Regretting You is a tribute to the transportational properties of cinema; for two very long hours you’ll be wondering what year it is, where you are, and what the hell you’re doing there. Rarely was a film more aptly titled, unless, of course, you’re a fan of novelist Colleen Hoover, whose most famous book, It Ends With Us, featured a love triangle between a florist, her high-school crush and a violent neurosurgeon. Regretting You is a similarly ridiculous and overwrought slice of melodrama, leavened with strange moments of comedy that leave you wondering if the whole thing isn’t some kind of bizarre art project, an elaborate, camp parody of the very notion of romantic literature itself.
The target audience will presumably be sent whooshing back in time to the summer of 2007 by the Proustian sounds of Vegas rock band The Killers, whose music plays a significant role for two of the main characters. In the opening scenes, we meet the film’s key quartet at a raucous end-of-term celebration. Morgan (Allison Williams) is there with her jock boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), her party-girl sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and Jenny’s bookish beau Jonah (Dave Franco). Chris and Jenny go off to have fun, leaving Morgan and Jonah alone. “How did we end up with our exact opposites?” says Jonah.
Morgan, however, has a secret: She is pregnant with Chris’ child, a bombshell that is literally accompanied by fireworks. Fast-forward 17 years, and Morgan is now married to Chris and the mother of a 16-year-old daughter named Clara (Mckenna Grace). It’s Jenny’s birthday, and so she comes to visit Morgan with her new baby. Jenny has hooked up with Jonah again after a long, unexplained absence, and his presence is the elephant in the room.
In the meantime, Clara is being delayed by a quirky meet-cute with Miller (Mason Thames), an aspiring filmmaker and — despite there being no evidence other than Clara’s word for it — “the coolest guy in school.” When she finally gets to the birthday party, Clara is immediately warned off Miller, who lives on a remote farm with his ailing grandpa, partly because, like a character in a ’60s Shangri-Las’ song, a) he already has a girlfriend but mostly because b) his father sold drugs and went to prison for it. (It’s a wonder that nobody actually says, “What do you mean when you say that he came from the wrong side of town?”) Something else concerning Morgan is the fact that Clara is an aspiring actress. “The world is hard,” she notes, “but that world is even harder.”
Clara is on cloud nine, excitedly texting Aunt Jenny with giant speech bubbles that pop on the screen until the messages suddenly stop. It transpires that Jenny has been killed in a car crash along with Morgan’s husband, who was driving. But why was he driving another woman’s car? Morgan and Jonah are both gut-punched when it becomes clear that their spouses have been carrying on behind their backs for years, a fact that even casts some doubt over Jonah’s paternity. Even though their infidelity is — how do we put this delicately? — really, really obvious, Morgan decides that Clara must never know, leaving the poor girl to believe she somehow caused the crash by distracting Jenny. All this and we’re barely 35 minutes in — Morgan has yet to find out that Jonah, as we have always known from the outset, is secretly in love with her and always has been.
To quote Shakespeare, without wishing to make any further comparisons with a literary giant, the path of true love does not run smooth, and the rest of the film concerns a series of misunderstandings that extend its running time almost to the limits of endurance. Tonally, Regretting You is all over the place, a perfectly serviceable Hallmark movie subjected to unnecessary ironic smarts. In that respect, the entire cast deserve kudos for playing their parts with a straight face, notably Williams as Morgan and Grace as Clara, who seems to have inherited Alicia Silverstone’s entire wardrobe from Clueless (no wonder she has a change of outfit for every day of the week). Indeed, it’s not hard to see either part behind played by Divine in the aftermath of Polyester.
Needless to say, Regretting You is hardly what you’d call a critic’s movie, but at the same time it isn’t exactly The Notebook either. As the old saying goes, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Title: Regretting You
Distributor: Paramount
Release date: October 22, 2025
Director: Josh Boone
Screenwriter: Susan McMartin, from the novel by Colleen Hoover
Cast: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Mason Thames, Dave Franco, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, Clancy Brown
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 56 mins