When her husband and sister are both killed in a horrific car accident, Morgan (Allison Williams) discovers a shocking family betrayal that puts a strain on her relationship with daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace), who finds solace in classmate Miller (Mason Thames).
It’s a good time to be a Colleen Hoover fan. After the adaptation of the best-selling author’s novel It Ends With Us took over $350 million at the global box office, several more of her books are getting the cinematic treatment. The next to make it to screens is Regretting You, which enlists the services of The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone. But while that film struck a keen balance between weepy drama and romance, the combination of those same narrative strands is delivered far less effectively here.
Things get off to an inauspicious start with a high-school flashback that digitally de-ages all the adult actors. Visually, it just looks off, but it does make a few things clear: Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jonah (Dave Franco) might be a perfect match for each other, but Jonah is dating Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), while Morgan has just discovered that she and boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood) are about to have a baby, and are therefore considering marriage. Fast forward 17 years; Morgan and Chris are raising daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace), Jonah and Jenny recently became new parents, and all seems fine. But when Chris and Jenny die in a car accident – and as a result, their years-long affair is revealed – Jonah and Morgan must grapple with their loss, as well as their dormant feelings for each other. It’s a lot!
Any exploration of overcoming grief feels surface-level, always coming second to lesser (and very predictable) romantic plots.
There’s a good movie in here somewhere, about a mother and daughter trying to find their way through grief and betrayal to some sort of happiness. We even glimpse it, now and again. Williams is a capable, compelling lead, and there’s a natural, lived-in feel to her early scenes with Grace’s Clara. But once tragedy strikes, any tender mother-daughter moments are few and far between, Susan McMartin’s script instead electing to keep Clara in rebellious brat mode for much of the movie’s runtime. It gets old fast. As for Morgan and Jonah, the sparks that Williams and Franco sporadically generate never blossom into the type of sustained heat you’d expect from characters who have been secretly pining for one another for so long.
But all of that gets short shrift in favour of the YA romance subplot between Clara and Miller (How To Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames). And though Grace and Thames do have chemistry – with Boone often lingering on the longing looks they exchange – Miller’s characterisation is weirdly at odds with the charming, chivalrous guy he presents himself as. From dumping his girlfriend (whom we never see), getting back together with her, and then dumping her again, to an unintentionally creepy final sequence that is not nearly as sweet as it thinks it is, there are multiple red flags that go unacknowledged. It also doesn’t help that Boone insists on having every text exchange that pops up on screen also be vocalised – a small but unnecessary choice that grows more irritating every time it’s used.
“Smiling feels wrong right now. Like it’s too soon to be happy,” Clara remarks at one point, while on a date with Miller. The same could be said for this movie as a whole. Any exploration of overcoming grief feels surface-level, always coming second to lesser (and very predictable) romantic plots. And so, what could have been an emotionally resonant flick ends up feeling too light and too flat, far too often.
Solid performances can’t keep this from being a tonally erratic disappointment. Here’s hoping the next Hoover adaptation is a little less regrettable.