Regretting You

The Weight of Soap

At some point, apparently, we decided movies should sometimes feel like an afternoon spent folding laundry, and the Colleen Hoover adaptation pipeline has embraced that with almost scientific commitment. Josh Boone, who once handled adolescent grief with real tenderness in *The Fault in Our Stars*, directs *Regretting You*, based on Hoover’s 2019 novel. It asks us to sit seriously with betrayal, sudden death, and family collapse, then casually breaks the mood for shameless AMC Theaters product placement. Maybe that’s secretly a grand statement on how grief gets packaged and sold. More likely, it just slipped through because nobody cared.



The story is built like a soap-opera nesting doll. First we get an extended mid-2000s flashback, complete with The Killers on the radio so nobody misses the date stamp. Then we arrive in the present, where Morgan (Allison Williams) and her husband Chris (Scott Eastwood) have spent seventeen years raising Clara (Mckenna Grace), the daughter who locked them into adulthood too early. A car crash kills Chris and Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and the real gut punch comes after: Chris and Jenny had been having an affair. Morgan and Jonah (Dave Franco), Jenny’s surviving partner, are left trying to grieve two people they now also have every reason to resent.

It’s a nasty little emotional knot, the kind melodrama can really feast on, but Boone shoots it with the bland gleam of a furniture catalog. Even scenes that should feel raw are flooded with bright, flattening light, and the framing rarely does more than functional television coverage. The film keeps insisting on heartbreak while refusing to look like anyone’s inner world has actually been shattered.



Allison Williams is the one person who keeps the whole thing from dissolving completely. She’s always been good at playing women whose composure feels like it might crack like glass, and that brittle quality serves her beautifully here. *Vulture* was right to single out her "turbo-loaded deadpan," especially the way her eyes seem to glare on a slightly different track from the rest of her face. In the aftermath of the funeral, her whole body looks trapped. Her shoulders ride high, her hands keep hovering around her waist as if they’ve forgotten what to do, and she carries herself like someone suffocating inside a punchline no one else seems to hear.

There’s one scene that nearly cuts through the movie’s synthetic haze. Morgan finds a stash of love letters exchanged between her late husband and her sister. The usual move would be obvious: read them aloud, cue the montage, invite the audience to wallow. Instead, she shreds them without reading a word. It’s a startling act of self-defense. For a moment, the movie understands something sharp and true—that there are answers capable of making grief even uglier.



But the film can’t hold onto that edge. It keeps retreating into Clara’s parallel romance with a local boy named Miller (Mason Thames), and while the two of them are sweet enough together, there’s almost no friction in it. By the time it builds to an elaborate promposal that feels airlifted in from another movie, the grief that should be smothering Clara’s life has faded into background decoration. Richard Lawson in *The Hollywood Reporter* got at the problem when he described the film as full of "plodding, uninventive, unthoughtful attempts at swoon and heartbreak".

I’m not against melodrama. People crying in the rain has a long and honorable history. There’s comfort in watching someone else’s catastrophe when your own problems are safely indoors. But *Regretting You* treats its pain like a checklist item instead of something lived through. It keeps gesturing toward the mess of betrayal without ever being willing to step into it.