The Broken Hearts Gallery is proof that even the best ideas can be drained of absolutely any value and meaning. Writer/Director Natalie Krinsky has taken an absolutely beautiful idea that connects the human element between romance, pain, art, and beauty that includes a talented cast and reduced it to the most fundamental and predictable paint-by-numbers Rom-Com. Everything about the film is fine. Just... fine. It's just a shame to see so much potential reduced to your every day forgettable formula film.

Lucy, played by the incredibly likable Geraldine Viswanathan, is a talented art gallery assistant that is brimming with enthusiastic potential who is in a funk after her latest relationship fallout leaves her both heartbroken and unemployed. Her life is filled with souvenirs from her relationship history, crowding out her life with pent up emotions. After meeting Nick (played by Dacre Montgomery), a character so bland that I'm not sure he's ever even given a last name, Lucy is able to begin to connect with people on a widespread emotional level by starting a movement of celebrating the discarding of items that people hold onto after broken relationships. As the movement buds into a promising art gallery of emotional relics, Lucy and Nick spiral into a will-they-won't-they romance of possibility as each are plagued by the emotional parasites from their pasts.

Despite the basic plot, The Broken Hearts Gallery has this fantastic setting that is so wonderfully relatable. This sense of struggling with letting go is outstandingly easy to identify with and the idea of a communal place to release that pain is inspiring. Anyone who follows along with Post Secret knows the power of being able to externalize something that you've held in for so long that it becomes part of your identity. I was just so let down, though, when the film failed to truly share any of that catharsis with me. The bland romance between Nick and Lucy at the forefront of the story sucks away all of the feelings from the world around them.

Not to say that it's bad. It's certainly not very good. The acting is heartfelt. Geraldine is charmingly entertaining. Dacre isn't bad, but it's very difficult to buy him as the romantic lead in a comedy. There is just something oddly sinister about him, though, I could just be carrying over my feelings from his very successful performance in Stranger Things. The writing is quite sharp from time to time and I got a number of laughs from the movie.

If you love a good Rom-Com and you don't anything deeper than that, you'll enjoy The Broken Hearts Gallery, but if you need absolutely anything deeper than the shallow end of the pool then give it a pass. At the end of the day, this just fails completely to rise up to the potential of its source material or deliver anything of any real substance.