Based on the book by Colleen Hoover
Cast: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Sam Morelos, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald, Clancy Brown
Genre: Drama, Romance
Director: Josh Boone
In Irish Cinemas: 24th October 2025
Last year, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends With Us nearly earned a spot among the year’s best films. The director took a clumsily written Colleen Hoover novel and transformed it into a persuasive and often beautiful melodrama. The film’s world felt richly imagined, and producer-star Blake Lively delivered a soulful, unexpectedly nuanced performance. Scandal aside, it was a genuinely good movie.
That success set expectations high for the subsequent Hoover adaptation, Regretting You. Directed by Josh Boone, who brought surprising tenderness to The Fault in Our Stars, the film seemed poised to receive a similar cinematic uplift. Yet from its opening moments, something feels off.
Where It Ends With Us exuded polish and confidence; Regretting You comes across as cheaper and visually uncertain. The story begins in the past, forcing Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Willa Fitzgerald, and Scott Eastwood to play teenage versions of their characters. Despite some digital de-ageing, the illusion never convinces. These thirtysomethings play youthful exuberance with strained energy, creating a faint awkwardness that lingers even as the story jumps seventeen years ahead.
In the present, Williams’s character, Morgan, is now the mother of teenage Clara (McKenna Grace), conceived with her high school sweetheart and husband, Chris (Eastwood). Their family seems content, if shaped by the compromises of a youthful pregnancy. Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Fitzgerald), has started her own family with Jonah (Franco), another rekindled high school romance. Clara shares a close bond with her aunt and father, while her relationship with her mother is understandably tense.
A sudden tragedy shatters this domestic balance, sending Morgan, Jonah, and Clara in diverging emotional directions. Secrets surface, guilt festers, and Clara seeks solace in Miller (Mason Thames), the local “coolest boy in school.” Miller, a kindhearted teen with his own quietly tragic backstory, serves as both romantic interest and emotional refuge for Clara, a safe, soft focus for adolescent longing.
The film splits into two storylines: Morgan and Jonah’s shared grief, and Clara’s budding romance. Why the younger subplot dominates remains unclear. It Ends With Us succeeded by centring adult emotion, but Regretting You seems designed to appeal to both mothers and daughters, the former drawn to moral melodrama, the latter to youthful infatuation.
This dual approach results in tonal confusion. The film’s treatment of grief and betrayal feels shallow, acknowledged one moment and brushed aside the next. Williams, a capable and expressive performer, struggles to ground such uneven emotional shifts. Both she and Franco seem adrift, as though surprised each time the film returns to them. A tighter focus on their adult anguish might have yielded something richer.
Instead, Regretting You lingers on Clara and Miller’s flimsy love story, a lightweight confection that never fully convinces. Boone deserves credit for casting actual teenagers, but the chemistry between Grace and Thames is faint. Their relationship unfolds predictably, stripped of the tension present in Hoover’s book, where Miller’s troubled background made him forbidden territory. Here, their connection glides along on rails, encountering only the mildest turbulence of adolescence.
The film compounds its weaknesses with glaring product placement —AMC Theatres, Starry soda, and even Paramount itself —so overt that it almost becomes self-parody. Miller’s bedroom, decorated with Paramount movie posters, suggests that in 2025, every teenage boy is apparently a devoted fan of Patriot Games (1992).
Clara’s best friend Lexie (Sam Morelos) exists solely to crack jokes and provide token diversity; she and another minor character of colour are conveniently paired in a background romance. Morelos at least manages a few genuine laughs, something the film rarely achieves intentionally.
Ultimately, Regretting You collapses under the weight of its own banality. With its sun-dappled North Carolina setting, syrupy score, and clumsy sentimentality, it recalls the worst habits of Nicholas Sparks adaptations. The film strives for swoon and sorrow but achieves only imitation, a polished surface concealing hollow emotion.
In the story’s final act, Morgan begins remodelling her family’s midcentury lake house, hammering away at its elegant original woodwork in an attempt to make it her own. By the film’s end, the once-distinct home is stripped of character, rendered plain and forgettable, much like Regretting You itself, a film destined to fade from memory after a single, half-interested scroll past.
Overall: 6/10
Movie Reviewer
