Regretting You Review: Lifeless Adaptation

Regretting You turns Colleen Hoover’s novel into a lifeless drama filled with bad acting, awkward dialogue, and zero chemistry.

The first act sets up Morgan (Allison Williams, of M3GAN 2.0) and and her daughter Clara’s (Mckenna Grace, of Ghostbuster: Frozen Empire) complicated relationship with some potential. Morgan is shown as a woman whose identity has been swallowed by motherhood and wants Clara to have a better life and opportunities than she did. Clara, restless and impulsive, rebels in small but significant ways, her budding romance with a local boy named Miller (Mason Thames, of How to Train Your Dragon) being one of them. When tragedy strikes, it’s supposed to bring these two women together. Instead, it drives them further apart as long-buried secrets, particularly surrounding Morgan’s late husband, Chris (Scott Eastwood, of Alarum), and her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald, of Strange Darling) come to light.

On paper, that sounds like a recipe for a compelling family drama. In practice, the movie is a mess. The dialogue feels like it was written using AI. Conversations meant to be heartfelt come off forced and awkward, filled with melodramatic lines that kill any sense of authenticity. 

The entire cast is solid, but the direction here gives them almost nothing. Allison Williams is clearly trying her best but she often seems detached, reading her lines with a flatness that drains scenes of their emotional energy. Mckenna Grace, usually one of the most gifted young actors working today, struggles to rise above the awkward script. Their mother-daughter dynamic meant to be the film’s emotional core feels hollow and unnatural. Dave Franco’s Jonah Sullivan, a character caught between loyalty and guilt, is equally unconvincing, as if even he wasn’t sure what movie he was in.

Then there are the flashback sequences. Intended to offer a glimpse of Morgan and Chris’s teenage years, these scenes are unintentionally laughable. The actors, clearly far beyond their teenage years, try to play youthful versions of themselves, and the result is jarring. 

Visually, Boone brings little flair to the story. The film looks serviceable but lifeless, like a mid-tier streaming drama designed to fill a content quota. 

Perhaps the most frustrating part of Regretting You is that the themes of grief, forgiveness, and the ways love can wound as much as it heals are genuinely worth exploring. But the execution is so surface-level and tonally confused that it drains any power the story might’ve had. By the time Morgan and Clara reach some semblance of understanding, it’s hard to care, because the film hasn’t given you a reason to invest in them.

Regretting You wants to make you cry, but it doesn’t earn a single tear. It’s a hollow, awkward, and painfully generic drama that fails to capture the emotional complexity of Hoover’s novel or the human truth at its center.

Regretting You is now available to watch globally in theaters.