Regretting You Review
An interminable slog of a film that plays fast and loose with well-trodden cliches.
Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and her daughter Clara Grant (Mckenna Grace) have a somewhat strained relationship. But when tragedy befalls them and Allison’s childhood friend and brother in law Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco), the relationship threatens to fracture entirely.
Josh Boone directs this lifeless adaptation of the Colleen Hoover novel, which has none of the prestige or production value (as much as it was) of the most recent Hoover adaptation, It Ends With Us.
Perhaps the behind the scenes drama from that ill-fated film gave it the energy and frission it had, because from cinematography and pacing, to dialogue and performance, this adaptation is as lifeless as they come.
Williams and Franco sleepwalk their way through the only remotely compelling part of the movie. The complexity of their romance, the impact in multiple layers of the tragedy they experience, and the complications of their partners and their actions could have held real gravitas, but it's played as straight as they come, in a series of short vignettes that reek of paint-by-numbers filmmaking.
That’s because this plot thread is pretty much sidelined in favour of (a) a completely grating, unbelievable mother daughter conflict and (b) a very much done before, completely grating and unbelievable teenage romance.
McKenna Grace, who plays the ostensible lead in this film, really cannot carry the material - as spare as it is - and while Miller Adams who plays her young love interest occasionally shines, for the most part the younger generation story just sucks the air from the film. Williams herself also often finds herself hamstrung by the material, with little believability in the more emotional moments of her performance.
Couple this with a visual palette more akin to a shoddy hallmark Christmas movie than a big budget cinema event, and you have a film that feels like an absolute step back into the more banal tropes of the source material, rather than one that elevates it for a broader audience. After the surprising success of Hoover’s last adaptation, this couldn’t have been more of a disappointment.
