Regretting You, 2025.
Directed by Josh Boone
Starring McKenna Grace, Mason Thames, Alison Williams, Dave Franco, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald, and Clancy Brown.
SYNOPSIS:
Centers on the strained relationship between young mother Morgan Grant and her teenage daughter Clara, exacerbated by Morgan’s husband Chris’s tragic death, forcing them to navigate life’s challenges together.
There’s a moment in the aptly titled Regretting You in which a peripheral character, who also happens to be one of the only likeable members of this soft-focus ensemble, utters the line “we’re going to ride this shit out together”. It’s notable because it’s one of the few intentionally funny lines in the film, but more pertinently, it feels like a rallying cry to anyone suffering through this ridiculous slice of overwrought grief-porn.
The ingredients were there for this to be the kind of mid-level melodrama that used to populate the multiplex line-ups rather than getting lost amongst a streaming service algorithm. A Notebook or Dear John-level girls-night/date-night drama. It’s also directed by The Fault in Our Stars helmer Josh Boone, who steered that YA weepie to $300 million at the worldwide box-office, and finally it’s adapted from the novel by TikTok favourite and omnipresent It Ends With Us author Coleen Hoover.
Regretting You begins quite promisingly; there’s a nice meet-cute between Mason Thames’ kid-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-track and Mckenna Grace’s wholesome college candidate; a de-aged flashback to when our main players were living their lives of beer-pong and teenage pregnancy; and a general Dawson’s Creek-vibe to proceedings that feels also nostalgic and cosy to sit in.
Then, the big dramatic/predictable double-twist happens, and Regretting You collapses into a sombre, silly affair with some of the clunkiest direlogue outside of a cable-channel telenovela. Lines intended as trauma generate titters. Potentially dramatic moments, particularly those involving Dave Franco’s Jonah, are undermined by an almost embarrassed and stilted delivery.
Even the aforementioned set-up between the film’s two youngest stars, both of whom have effortless likability, has a Usual Suspects-style reveal that makes their whole narrative arc and central romance feel really, really icky, while simultaneously being absolutely hilarious. It’s in keeping with a movie that’s a tonal mess.
The cast try their best with the syrupy script, but when you turn the likes of Alison Williams, so good in HBO’s Girls and Get Out, and Willa Fitzgerald, similarly terrific in Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, into such hollow, lifeless characters, then you’re doing something very wrong.
So much worse than simply being a self-fulling prophecy of a title, Regretting You exists somewhere between Friday night so-bad-it’s-good giggle and just being a downright dull.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
