Regretting You (2025)
Directed by: Josh Boone
Premise: Based on the novel by Colleen Hoover. A woman and her brother-in-law (Allison Williams and Dave Franco) lose their spouses in a car accident and discover that the deceased were having an affair. They conceal the truth from the teenage daughter (Mckeena Grace).
What Works: The actors of Regretting You generally do a good job especially allowing for the material they have been given. Mckenna Grace plays the bereaved teenager who is coming up on high school graduation and has made a love connection with a fellow student played by Mason Thames. The relationship between Grace and Thames’ characters is the best part of the movie. They are an appealing couple and the romantic details of their courtship ought to make teenage viewers swoon.
What Doesn’t: Regretting You is a story about overcoming betrayal and grief but the filmmaking and the writing are utterly disconnected from the themes and the action. Nothing in this movie is believable and nearly everything is pitched wrong. A mother and daughter lose the husband and father of the family but nothing about their grief is convincing. Allison Williams and Mckenna Grace’s characters are just catty. Their scenes play as a domestic sitcom instead of a study of loss. The tone cheapens the loss of life and the filmmakers sidestep anything interesting about the betrayal and what it means for the daughter’s memory of her father and aunt. There is no impression of grief to the movie. That’s attributable to bad writing but it’s also a result of the filmmaking choices. The style is out of sync with the material. Everything is bright and beautiful; Regretting You looks like a country living magazine. The film is flooded with product placements that are ostentatious and distracting. The story flashes back to the teenage years of Allison Williams and Dave Franco’s characters. The filmmakers don’t cast younger actors. They just slightly change Williams and Franco’s hair. It’s so lazy that it becomes unintentionally funny. The dialogue is often cringy and sounds as though it was created by a middle-aged writer imagining how teens speak. The story of Regretting You is badly structured and paced. It takes about a half hour to get to the car accident. The middle of the movie has no focus. It isn’t building toward anything. The filmmakers avoid grief or anything else that might make the audience feel in any way bad so there’s no emotional arc, no healing, and virtually no climax.
Bottom Line: Regretting You might play for the Hallmark movie crowd but that’s not a compliment. It’s baggy and boring. The filmmakers have created a tragedy without gravitas and Regretting You is a big nothing.
Episode: #1073 (November 9, 2025)