[This piece discusses the plot of both the Alice Munro short story on which Hateship Loveship is based and the film itself, although it's frankly nothing you can't intuit from the trailer.]
The Alice Munro short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" begins with a plain and awkward woman named Johanna arranging a shipment of furniture and shopping for a dress. She's leaving town to go to the man she expects to marry, though he hasn't yet asked. The story shifts to follow the nasty fellow she's been working for, who's angry about her departure, and then it makes its way to Edith.
Edith is a young teenager, and with her at the center of the narrative, we leap back in time to learn how Johanna came to be leaving: Edith and her friend Sabitha played a cruel joke in which they made it appear that this man, Sabitha's father, was writing Johanna love letters. He was not. But, fooled into believing she's been carrying on a long-distance romance, Johanna made plans to leave all she knows and head off to what appears certain to be abject humiliation.
We then jolt forward to the present, where Johanna arrives at her destination, and we follow her for a short time again. But then we leap ahead two years. And those two years later, we learn, through a notice in the paper read to Edith by her mother, what became of Johanna and Ken.
Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. To adapt her work, as screenwriter Mark Poirier and director Liza Johnson have done for the film Hateship Loveship, is a hugely daunting thing. The risk is that there is a way to look at this story that would rob it of everything about it that's interesting, and that way to look at this story is the way this trailer looks at it.