The Life List Review
Director: Adam Brooks
Date Created: 2025-03-28 14:49
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The Life List Review: Directed by Adam Brooks, this Netflix feature stars Sofia Carson as Alex, Kyle Allen as Brad, Connie Britton as Elizabeth and Sebastian de Souza as Garrett. An adaptation of Lori Nelson Spielman’s novel, the film centres on Alex, a wealthy, spoiled young woman whose life comes unmoored following her mother’s death. And, unlike her siblings, who will inherit money, she must fulfil a childhood bucket list — one assignment at a time — before she can have anything. Is something that sounds emotional and meaningful, yeah? But the film doesn’t earn its potential.
The Life List Review
There’s nothing particularly wrong with a story about self-discovery, but when the main character is absurdly privileged, it’s difficult to consider their “struggles” with any seriousness. The narrative of Alex losing her job and “being forced” to finish up her bucket list is framed as a life-altering hardship, but come on — she still has a cushy life. Unlike most people who confront grief while juggling work, bills and responsibilities, Alex gets to go on a personal journey with zero real-world ramifications.
The film never references this privilege, which makes it even more difficult to relate to. If the show had any sense of irony in its enviable plot — a moment where Alex brushes up against her incredible good fortune and awareness of her privileged plight — it could have been much more. But instead, it treats her experiences as profound and transformative when they’re really just minor inconveniences pretending to be life lessons.
For a film about loss and finding oneself, Netflix’s The Life List is an oddly dispassionate effort. I was hoping for something with some emotional depth — maybe something would at least cause me to reflect on life or feel anything. But the storytelling is so skimpy that I never became emotionally invested.
The biggest problem was that Alex’s journey never felt deserved. Nothing, including doubt, weighs her down; she moves, task to task, with relative ease. Whatever problem she has gets solved almost immediately. This eliminates any feeling of progress. I wanted to watch her truly struggle, reflect and become different, but instead, she just sort of breezes through her bucket list as if it’s a checklist, and the world is just an accessory that requires no effort.
I’m familiar with Sofia Carson from other roles, and while she has screen presence, I found her performance in The Life List movie disappointingly flat. Her delivery stays the same whether she’s meant to be grieving, confused or happy. She’s reading lines rather than living lines.
The rest of the cast doesn’t provide much assistance, either. Her mother, played by Connie Britton, appears only in video messages. Kyle Allen as Brad is fine, but his character is thinly drawn. Even the romance feels shoehorned in — there’s no real chemistry or tension.
Even with a twist, one of the fatal disappointments of The Life List is its predictability. You know from the beginning how each of these will play out. Not a single surprise across the entire “rich girl learns life lessons” narrative-presentation formula. There’s no actual tension, no real emotional beats — just a progression of neatly packaged events that results in a predictable conclusion.
Summing Up
Netflix has been churning out these rich-people-problem-type movies lately, and while some of them are entertaining at least, The Life List just feels a little tone deaf. It wants to be heartfelt, but it never goes deep enough to seem real. It’s not the most awful thing to exist, but it’s definitely forgettable. The story is shallow and the characters difficult to connect with, and the performances are flat. And when much better movies about self-discovery exist that can make you feel something and this one plays out like the motions but without the impact.
Adam Brooks’s The Life List is now streaming on Netflix.
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