There’s thankfully no domestic violence in Regretting You, the second Colleen Hoover film adaptation following last year’s leering and tone-deaf It Ends With Us, but just about every other genre cliché helps the film avoid being merely detestable and approach the sublimely ridiculous. A multigenerational love story of fairy tale logic, moralizing melodrama, and a Taylor Swift-like idolization of all things high school, Regretting You jams a season’s worth of soap opera silliness into a two-hour romance. The best that can be said about the film is that The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone, well-versed with the teen weepy, sometimes approaches the schlock with a bit of self-deflating slyness—something more attuned to the audience’s eyerolls and the cast’s barely-hidden smirks than to the serious source material.
That’s a boon for a story whose developments have a more obvious authorial hand puppetmastering them than Stranger Than Fiction. Each narrative detail and stilted line of dialogue gestures with the subtlety of an aircraft marshaller towards the parallel relationships between longtime friends Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jonah (Dave Franco), and between Morgan’s daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) and Jonah’s student Miller (Mason Thames). These relationships—one between people who met in high school, one between teens on the cusp of graduating—have a surface-level connection and substitute proximity for resonance. But before getting to the two lightly interlocking halves of Regretting You, the premise deserves the spotlight.
See, Morgan and Jonah aren’t unattached at the beginning of the story. Flashbacks that do nothing to de-age the film’s late-30s ensemble establish an uneasy high school quartet: Morgan, her hunky boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), and her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), who’s dating the nerdy Jonah. “Can you believe we ended up with our opposites?” asks a blatantly 40-year-old Franco, as Chris and Jenny channel their inner Steve Buscemi to play beer pong. Clearly, these two quiet, thoughtful sweeties belong with each other, not with their harder-partying counterparts. But Morgan is locked down: She’s pregnant, which means she and Chris get married so they can raise Clara. Jonah dumps Jenny and skips town soon after graduating, but rolls back through 17 years later to knock her up. So, in the present day, the high school dynamics persist: Morgan and Chris, Jonah and Jenny—the former with a 17-year-old, the latter with a newborn—neither couple seeming quite right, but only because the film insists that’s the case.
But not to worry: a car accident ripped from various lurid headlines (and the early pages of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods) kills two birds with one hilariously deadly affair. Chris and Jenny are sacrificed to mighty Eros, and their dead names dragged through the mud over and over again, so that Morgan and Jonah can go after each other guilt-free. These were not characters, but annoying obstacles to a love that was meant to be. That’s why the script (adapted by Susan McMartin, screenwriter of One Direction fanfic After) barely considers them before and after snuffing them out. Morgan and Jonah aren’t too broken up about it and neither is Regretting You, which spends much of its runtime in a totally different universe than this torrid tragedy.
More than half the film concerns the whirlwind romance between Clara and Miller. Clara’s kept in the dark about the true nature of the crash that killed her aunt and father (and she’s too self-involved, or dim-witted, to put two and two together), so aside from some sporadic crying and a few predictable “why didn’t you just tell her from the beginning” moments, she mostly ignores this traumatizing accident in favor of going through the school-age dating beats with the coolest guy in class. Grace and Thames—whose performance is either in Jaw Clench or Smirk mode—at least have some chemistry as they navigate prom-posals, movie theater dates (the film at times resembles an AMC commercial), and sneaking out to kiss in a parking lot; their older counterparts seem like they’re both trying not to laugh as they deliver each overworked line.
Inevitably these two arcs crash headlong into one another, the truth comes out, and everyone must confront the ugliness underneath their new loves. Except, that last part doesn’t happen. Regretting You has surprisingly little regret. Despite some throwaway lines about the responsibilities and confines of Morgan’s young motherhood, there’s no real exploration of the tricky emotions that might manifest from feeling railroaded into raising a kid with the first lunkhead you slept with, or from being the product of a relationship that was perhaps always built on a lie. There’s no time for these insights when you’ve got to make room for gaudy subplots about cancer, college, paternity, and the genre-mandated Funny Ethnic Friend (you deserve better, Sam Morelos).
This leaves Regretting You in the shape of a romance, without any of the emotion that usually fills in the outline. In its shallow devotion to first, meant-to-be love and to simplistic, binary morals (Drinking and drugs? Sin! Cheating? Death! Sex? You’re on thin ice.), Hoover’s story is simply a thoughtless vehicle, filled with one-note characters, designed to efficiently deliver a marketable number of romance beats per second. Without any tumultuous on-set drama this time to spice up the conversation (and distract everyone from the actual content of the film), even BookTok devotees will find themselves yearning for more.
Director: Josh Boone
Writer: Susan McMartin
Starring: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, Clancy Brown
Release Date: October 24, 2025
