“The Vow” is based on a true story.

    In the opening scene, lovebirds Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) leave the Music Box, a beautiful old Chicago cinema, on a snowy night, get in their car and are soon hit from behind by a truck, sending Paige flying through the windshield*.

    Cut to four years earlier, the beginning of the love story is cute enough. They marry secretly in a gallery* of the Art Institute of Chicago where she’s a student.

    Back in the present, conflict* arrives at the hospital when Paige’s long-absent parents (Sam Neill, Jessica Lange), rich old prigs*, try to use the excuse of their daughter’s memory loss of her more recent years — she forgets who Leo is — to take her away from her husband back to their Lake Forest home.

    Leo is truly in love with Paige. Reluctantly* agreeing to return to their downtown loft* to see if she could think of something, Paige remembers nothing. But Leo insists. Despite trouble from her parents and a downturn* at the recording studio he runs, he decides: “I’ve got to make my wife fall in love with me again.”

    He asks her out on a “first date,” gets her to swim in Lake Michigan and accompanies* her back to their old haunt*, the Cafe Mnemonic. She still can’t remember Leo, who waits patiently, even when Paige has no trouble remembering her high school lover Jeremy (Scott Speedman), whom she broke up with but who wants to take advantage of the situation to win her back.

    In his big-screen feature debut*, director Michael Sucsy does his job with computerlike precision*; every composition and cut is made with its calculated* effect. Particularly surprising are the music cues for the pop songs, on each one of which you can feel the button being pushed for the desired* emotional effect.

    (SD-Agencies)