This is also a byproduct of the nascent chemistry between Stanfield and Rae, two genial, good-looking people that just don't have that spark or urgency when they're comfortably close. It's a strange experience because even as things are, on paper, moving forward, the movie feels stagnant.

It feels like writer/director Stella Meghie (Everything Everything) should be mining more insights and revelations from this mother/daughter re-examination, but by the end we haven't learned anything we didn't already know in the first thirty minutes. Sure, we still get the boy-meets-girl and boy-loses-girl paces expected but there's precious little depth given to these people.

The problem is that these characters all feel trapped in boxes, confined, and the personal growth onscreen is minimal. They all have potential a journalist (Lakeith Stanfield) getting closer to a story than he anticipated, a woman (Issa Rae) learning more about her artistic, ambitious, and self-involved mother (Chante Adams) after her death.

The Photograph is a romantic drama that is unfortunately tethered to three very uninteresting lead characters.

Intitleindex of the photograph 2020