Allison Williams in Dull Colleen Hoover Flick

Last year, I seriously considered putting Justin Baldoni’s It Ends With Us on my best movies of the year list. The film takes a poorly written novel by mega-author Colleen Hoover and turns it into persuasive, often lovely melodrama. Its world is finely wrought, its lead performance — from producer Blake Lively — is soulful and surprising. It’s a good movie, scandal be damned. 

Which is why I had perhaps higher-than-average hopes for the follow-up Hoover adaptation, Regretting You. The film is directed by Josh Boone, who worked little wonders with his cinematic rendering of the blockbuster YA novel The Fault in Our Stars, and I figured he could apply the same zhuzhing touch to one of Hoover’s high-drama novels. (Fault in Our Stars is, to be fair, much better source material.) Near immediately, though, it is clear that something is off.  

Compared to the lacquered polish of It Ends With Us, Boone’s film is chintzier, less aesthetically assured. It certainly doesn’t help matters that the movie begins in the past, which forces actors Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Willa Fitzgerald and Scott Eastwood to play teenagers. They look like they’ve been digitally de-aged a bit, but for the most part it’s merely a quartet of 30-somethings playing at the loose, eager energy of youth. There’s something garish about it, leaving a faint, acrid whiff hanging in the air of the movie even after it zooms ahead 17 years. 

In the present day, Williams’ character, Morgan, is the mother of teenage Clara (McKenna Grace), whom she conceived with her high-school sweetheart, now husband, Chris (Eastwood). They seem to be a happy enough family, even though their beginnings involved an unexpected teen pregnancy and, thus, the deferral of a dream or two. Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Fitzgerald), has just gotten started on her own family with Jonah (Franco), her own high-school beau, with whom she has reunited after a long period of estrangement. Clara is quite close to her aunt and father, while — as these relationships so often go — testier with her mom. 

A tragedy soon interrupts this pleasant scene, sending Morgan, Jonah and Clara reeling in multiple directions. An indiscretion is uncovered, a new (and misplaced) guilt blooms, and Clara runs headlong away from her mother and into the arms of Miller (Mason Thames), a sweet-faced kid quite often referred to in the film as “the coolest boy in school.” Miller has his own sad little backstory, but mostly he is an emblem of easy, unassuming good, a hunky — but not threateningly so — shoulder of support for Clara to lean on, and a locus of budding teenage lust. 

Regretting You essentially splits itself into two occasionally intersecting plots, that of Morgan and Jonah’s healing and of Clara’s nascent romance. It’s not really clear why Clara’s storyline needs to be so prominent; It Ends With Us did just fine focusing on adults. Perhaps the calculation — initially Hoover’s, now Paramount’s — is that they can serve dual customers: mother and daughter (and some sons) trotting off to the movies together, one wanting a morally complicated romantic weepie, the other moony-eyed at Thames. 

What results, though, is a tonally erratic chore that might not satisfy either party. The tragedy side of things is addressed rather offhandedly — occasionally the movie will remember the boggling grief and betrayal at its center, only to shrug it off again just as quickly. Williams, a bright and natural actor, is stymied by these emotional shifts; both she and Franco get lost trying to find their appropriate level. Had the movie really trained its focus on these two ailing grownups, I suspect both could have developed more thorough, compelling performances. As is, they seem almost caught surprised and unprepared whenever the camera turns to them. 

The film seems much more invested in the gooey push and pull of Clara and Miller’s romance, as light and flimsy as styrofoam. Credit to Boone for casting actual teenagers to play teenagers (perhaps to offset the relative youth of the actors playing Clara’s family), but Grace nonetheless reads a lot older than Miller. Their chemistry is amiss; a more palpable spark could have helped sell the bland and basic developments cooked up by Hoover, Boone and screenwriter Susan McMartin. 

Hoover’s novel leaned harder on making Miller forbidden fruit; he’s from a bad family, and thus Morgan forbids Clara from seeing him. That tension is swatted at in the film, but only perfunctorily. Mostly the kids’ relationship glides on rails, encountering only the expected mild bumps of adolescence. It’s rather dull. 

Myriad other missteps are made. There is a lot of agonizingly unsubtle product placement — for AMC theaters, Starry soda, even Paramount itself. The Paramount plugs are so egregious they’re almost endearing: Miller wants desperately to go to film school, and thus his room is adorned, Dawson Leery style, with movie posters. Only the posters aren’t for Steven Spielberg movies, as they were for Dawson. They’re instead all Paramount releases of old. After all, what teenage boy in 2025 isn’t a fan of 1992’s Patriot Games? 

Clara has a best friend, Lexie (Sam Morelos), who exists solely for comic relief. Lexie is one of only two people of color in the film, the other being Miller’s coworker at the local AMC. Of course the two are forced together into a background romance. At least Morelos manages a few funny lines — all other laughs in the film are wholly accidental. 

What truly hampers Regretting You is its inescapable unoriginality, its plodding, uninventive, unthoughtful attempts at swoon and heartbreak. With its cloyingly sun-dappled North Carolina backdrops, maudlin score and severely undeveloped emotional and social intelligence, the film often evokes a dreaded entity: the cinematic oeuvre of Nicholas Sparks. I’ve no doubt that aping America’s most successful peddler of smarm was in some ways the intention, a riff on his wholesome mawkishness with a little more scandal and sex and alcohol tossed in. But Regretting You winds up just as soggy as any Sparks slop, carelessly laying waste to whatever might have differentiated it, even elevated it. 

In the film, Morgan and Clara live in a lovely mid-century home, inherited from Chris’ parents, that backs up to a lake. It’s got pristine original wood tones in the kitchen and is decorated with tasteful furniture to match. But throughout the course of the film, Morgan takes a hammer to it all, trying to reinvent this space into something more her. It says something about Regretting You that what’s revealed in the end is simply plain and generic, worth only a halfhearted Instagram like before it’s lost in the scroll.