Awkward! That’s the primary feeling one has throughout Love Again, a romantic comedy starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sam Hueghan where the romance remains at the conceptual level and the comedy makes you cringe.

Chopra Jonas’s Mira Ray is a children’s author and illustrator who loses her boyfriend in an accident right in front of her eyes (not ours). Two years later, she is still in mourning and to cope with the loss starts texting her dead boyfriend John. Only the dead boyfriend’s number is now being used by Heughan’s Rob Burns (awkward!), a (seriously underworked) music critic tasked to write a piece on the comeback US tour of singer Celine Dion, played by Celine Dion.

And thank god for Celine Dion; she is the one who actually does the heavy lifting when it comes to the humour, even though it is weird as hell. The queen of power ballads doubles as a love guru for Rob, who quite clearly needs the help.

Mira sends really intimate texts about fading smells and wanting to be naked with John and Rob starts developing feelings for the unknown woman sending those texts. Not creepy at all. Even more not creepy is the fact that he decides to find out who the texter is in real life, using some details Mira shares via the texts.

Rob first spots Mira at a bar where she goes on a Bumble date at her sister’s insistence. The guy in question? Chopra Jones’s husband in IRL Nick Jonas, who plays a dude-bro convincingly enough but has no impact on the story whatsoever. Rob finally meets Mira at the opera and has one of the most awkward introductory conversations; no, it wasn’t cute.

Mira likes Rob enough to dip her toes into dating for the first time since her boyfriend’s death. But for someone who is still grieving, she seems to cosy up to Rob incredibly quickly. They have many things in common, like putting French fries in burgers and a love for sneakers, but unfortunately for the audience the only time their conversations have any depth and authenticity is when Mira talks about her dead boyfriend and Rob about the fiancee who dumped him. The rest of the time, it is mostly would-you-rather awkward questions that are either inane or cringeworthy.

Then there is the really awkward secret of Rob knowing intimate things about Mira and her dead boyfriend, which he doesn’t tell her about, but she of course eventually finds out. As a plot point, incredibly lame and so contrived, it is painful to watch.

Also, how could Heughan, who was so incredibly, intensely romantic in Outlander, be so painful to watch here? Chopra Jonas is fine when she is moping about missing her boyfriend but awkward when romancing. And Heughan had more chemistry with Dion and Mira’s younger sister (and they interacted in all of two scenes) than he had with Chopra Jonas.

The one good thing about Love Again — directed by James C. Strouse — is the nostalgia of Celine Dion songs you didn’t even know you remembered the lyrics to.