Film Review: Regretting You

Welcome back to the blog readers. One of the film genres that I have grown to sort of dislike in the past is book-to-film adaptations, especially films that come from romance novels. Most of the time, the appeal of the novel is lost in translation and we never really get to see an imagining of the original author's work. I felt like that was not the case with It Ends With Us (2024), and I was hopeful it would not be the case with this film? Would I be proven right, or would this motherfucker be embarrassed? Stick around to find out.

Regretting You was directed by Josh Boone from a screenplay by Susan McMartin, based on the novel Regretting You by Colleen Hoover. The film stars Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Sam Morelos, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, and Clancy Brown. In the film, after their partners are involved in a fatal car accident, a woman and her male best friend (and her daughter) must navigate the aftermath when a secret about the deceased comes to light.

The one trailer I saw for this film had a bit of charm to it, so I thought this would be more of an It Ends With Us than it would have been a Fault in Our Stars (2014) (that I admittedly did not watch). I like most of the people in the film (since I never saw Mckenna Grace in anything before), so I was kind of going in with an open mind. And the film played out exactly as I thought it would. It was a decent script with solid performances from Allison Williams and Grace, but the film's biggest flaw is its predictability.

I want to start as I always do with the performance of Allison Williams. Williams is someone that I (without really knowing it) took notice of in Get Out (2017), but the role in which I really began taking her seriously did not come until M3GAN (2023), when she played an aunt that took things too far. This film sees her taking on a more dramatic role as Morgan Grant. She brings the motherly charm I first saw in M3GAN and brings it over to her most serious, heartfelt, and emotional performance I have seen yet. She bore it all in this film, and she does a fantastic job of making you feel for her character through the ups and downs that we see from her. From tragedy to rediscovery, Williams brings a different kind of dimension to this character that I hopefully should see in future projects from her.

Next up, I want to talk about the performance of Mckenna Grace. Grace has been more of a lowkey actor, not really appearing in major projects, but some of the major ones she has been in are Captain Marvel (2019), I, Tonya (2017), and Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). So it suffices to say I did not really expect much in the way of her performance in this film, since I have not really gotten much of a sample size. But not only is Grace the heart and soul of this film, she completely stunned me with her emotional depth. For someone who is only nineteen years old, I totally did not expect her to be able to rise to the occasion like she did, and I am so glad she did. Her character of Clara Grant really resonated with me when not much else really did. Same as Allison Williams, Grace does a fantastic job of getting you invested in this character and her emotional journey throughout the nearly 2-hour runtime of the film.

Next up, I want to talk about the script of this film. Susan McMartin is our scribe for this film, and she had a tall order: adapt a pretty popular book despite not doing anything of note. I am not saying it wouldn't be a challenge, but I was also not saying it would be easy. For the most part, I do think she was able to pull together an adaptation that I would imagine is true to the novel. But I was able to judge it based on the words I was hearing on the screen, and I think the script is pretty decent. Nothing special, and it does run into some of the tropes with these young adult fiction adaptations, but I think it was serviceable for what it was. The one thing I have a major gripe with is when each character narrates their text messages like we can't see them on the screen already. It breaks the illusion and those scenes read more like a reality series that nobody cares about, like the Kardashians.

I want to end this review by talking about my main gripe regarding this film, and that absolutely has to do with the fact that this film was so damn predictable. I will be using spoilers for this paragraph, so read ahead at your own will. Ready? Here we go. The film starts off with Allison Williams and Dave Franco's characters clearly having chemistry, something that is hinted at multiple times in the film through flashbacks. Then, in the present, their partners are conveniently killed in a car accident and we find out (as if we actually didn't months ago) that they were having an affair. The one thing I did not anticipate is the newborn child being the product of the affair, and that kind of surprised me. But predictably, Williams and Franco's characters wind up together and it was telegraphed from the very start. Really drags the film down for me if you think about it.

In conclusion, Regretting You suffers from a decent, not great script and a predictable as hell story, but shines in terms of character work and performances. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.