Regretting You Review: Mckenna Grace Shines in Colleen Hoover Movie Adaptation
Regretting You, directed by Josh Boone and based on Hoover’s 2019 novel, is a deeply emotional and occasionally overstuffed romantic drama that thrives on its performances and human messiness. It is the kind of film that reminds you how love and grief can exist in the same breath, and how relationships, whether between lovers, parents, or children, are rarely as simple as they seem. While the script often stumbles into exposition and overwrought dialogue, its emotional truths and earnest performances shine through, resulting in a flawed but heartfelt experience.
The film establishes a few characters at the beginning: Morgan (Allison Williams), Jonah (Dave Franco), Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and Chris (Scott Eastwood). It’s a little challenging to tell what everyone’s relationship to each other is at first, but through a bit of heavy-handed exposition, we see that Morgan and Chris are married, Jonah and Jenny are married, and Morgan and Jenny are sisters. Soon after, a devastating car accident exposes a painful secret. Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco) discover that their spouses were having an affair with each other.
What follows is not a conventional story of betrayal but rather an exploration of the complicated ways people pick up the pieces. Morgan, now a widow and single mother, must find a way to reconnect with her teenage daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace), who is grappling with the loss of her father and her aunt, as well as her own turbulent first love with a boy named Miller (Mason Thames).
At its best, Regretting You captures the unpredictability of human behavior. Boone and screenwriter Susan McMartin juggle a surprising number of emotional threads, including grief, anger, forgiveness, romantic longing, and the desire for independence. Every character has a distinct internal logic, even when they make poor decisions. Jonah runs from his problems, Morgan tries to control hers, and Clara barrels through hers headfirst, searching for closure even when it hurts. They all feel like people rather than archetypes, and that gives the film a sense of authenticity that many literary adaptations lack.
Mckenna Grace and Mason Thames, in particular, are a revelation together. Their scenes pulse with youthful energy, alternating between tenderness and frustration in ways that feel refreshingly natural. Grace has long been one of the most emotionally intuitive young actors working today. At the age of 19, she has 74 acting credits on IMDB, not including this movie and her upcoming entries into the FNAF, Scream, and Hunger Games franchises. She’s an incredible talent, and Thames matches her note for note, creating a believable first-love dynamic that is very heartwarming. This is Thames’ third movie of the year after How to Train Your Dragon and Black Phone 2 (also in October), so he’s not doing too badly for himself either.
Their chemistry alone gives the film its heartbeat. Miller, an aspiring filmmaker, and Clara, an actress at heart, find solace in creativity and dreams of escape. It is a small subplot, but a surprisingly relatable one. Miller’s bedroom walls are covered in movie posters, and he keeps a copy of Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies on his nightstand, both details that hit close to home for me. I know people like Miller and Clara, the dreamers who see art as both escape and identity. I only wish Boone and McMartin had leaned further into that side of their story, because there is something rich in how art intertwines with grief and growth that the film only brushes against.
The adults, meanwhile, occupy a different emotional register. Allison Williams brings warmth and anxiety to Morgan, a mother caught between guilt and love, and her scenes opposite Dave Franco’s Jonah are among the film’s most quietly affecting. The two share a history complicated by their spouses’ betrayal and their own unresolved feelings. Franco, often cast in comedic or detached roles, delivers a surprisingly grounded performance here. His grief is understated but palpable, his guilt quietly consuming. There are a few moments where I wish they could have had more subtly written scenes, but everything’s a bit overwritten.
Boone, whose previous work (The Fault in Our Stars, The New Mutants) often toggles between teenage emotion and high-concept storytelling, handles the intimate, small-town setting with sensitivity. He understands that what makes Regretting You compelling is not its melodrama but its observation of how people hurt each other while trying to heal. The film is loaded with overlapping relationships: Morgan and Clara’s mother-daughter conflict, Jonah’s friendship-turned-romance with Morgan, Clara’s bond with Miller, and even the lingering presence of Jenny and Chris, whose affair casts a shadow over everyone. That density works to the movie’s advantage. It feels lived-in, full of tension and contradictions, like a family drama unfolding in real time.
Where Regretting You falters, however, is in its dialogue. Early scenes rely heavily on characters explaining who they are to each other, often in the bluntest possible terms. Later, when the emotional stakes rise, the film continues this pattern of verbalizing everything. Characters say exactly what they are feeling, leaving little room for subtext or silence. It is not that the emotions are not real—they are—but they are spelled out so explicitly that they lose some of their power. A quieter, more nuanced approach could have elevated the story into something truly affecting. It feels like the audience doesn’t need to do a lot of work to figure out what’s going on between our characters because the subtext is just text, plain and simple.
That is what makes Regretting You a somewhat frustrating experience. You can see the better version of this film lurking beneath the surface. The raw material is there: a tangled web of grief, love, betrayal, and reconciliation that could have been devastating in the right hands. With a few more drafts of the screenplay, a sharper editorial eye, and more faith in visual storytelling over exposition, it might have landed among the great literary weepies.
Still, what Regretting You does well is worth appreciating. It treats its characters with empathy even when they are making mistakes. It acknowledges that grief does not follow a clean arc and that forgiveness does not come easily. It gives space to its younger cast to express the confusion and hope of growing up in the shadow of adult mistakes. And it trusts its audience enough to care about these flawed, complicated people.
Messy, melodramatic, and occasionally moving, Regretting You is a story about the unsteady bridges we build between generations and the love that keeps us trying. It does not always find the right words, but sometimes, the attempt is enough.
SCORE: 6/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our Regretting You review.
Source: Comingsoon.net