Review of the movie “Regretting You”

Colin Hoover continues the same path that Nicholas Sparks started many years ago; Novels wedded to fake sentimentalism exaggerate all emotional aspects in the worst possible way, and seem to have no other concern than to present a distorted view of love and loss. After the commercial success of We’re Over It, it was obvious that Colin Hoover’s other novels would be made into movies, and now it’s time for one of his stand-alone books. You can read the review of the movie “Regretting You” in this article.

Warning! There is a risk of revealing the story in the review of the movie “Regrets of You”.

Before I get to “Regret You” itself, I need to talk a little about the context in which this film came to life. Most serious fans of literature are obviously not interested in Colin Hoover, but his target audience is those who I doubt are “literary” at all. Hoover owes his popularity to TikTok, and more specifically, to a group called BookTalk. “Booktalkers” are teenagers who make short videos about popular and commercial books.

The movie “Pishmani Oz To” was made exclusively for this special group. As the works of Nicholas Sparks attracted the attention of a certain group of millennials who were looking for emotional melodrama works; Colin Hoover is doing the same for Generation Z—and a group of millennial women. Last year, “We’ll Get It Done” sold 10 times its budget. “Regretting You” has been successful so far; A film directed by Josh Boone, who had paved the way for numerous film adaptations of teenage novels about illness a few years earlier with “Disturbed Fortune”.

The story takes place around a love square. Jonah (Dave Franco) and Morgan (Allison Williams) are in love but can’t be together because Jonah is in a relationship with Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and Morgan is with Jonah’s best friend Chris (Scott Eastwood). Ironically, Jenny and Chris also like each other. Things get complicated when Morgan becomes pregnant. 17 years later, Morgan and Chris, who are not related to each other, are married and have a grown child, Clara (Mackinna Grace). Jonah, who had disappeared for many years, returned and entered into a relationship with Jenny again and they have a small child!

Then, Jenny and Chris are killed in a fatal accident, and Morgan and Jonah learn that the two have been secretly in a relationship. In the midst of this feast of superficial tragedies and foolish betrayals, Morgan and Jonah have the opportunity for the first time to discover the love they have for each other and leave the past in the hands of oblivion. In the meantime, we also have a storyline about Clara’s romantic relationship with a young boy named Chris (Mason Thames), which has no particular ups and downs.

“Regret You” wants to be many things, a film about a difficult mother-daughter relationship in the modern age, a touching love story, a tale of mourning and loss, and a coming-of-age story. And the film resoundingly fails on all these fronts, mostly because the chemistry of the characters and their relationships is so far from reality and at no point is it believable.

The high sales of the movie “We will finish it” were not only due to the support of fans of the original book and extensive advertising. That film, unintentionally, benefited in three ways: in addition to telling a love story, it tackled sensitive and controversial topics like domestic violence and emotional abuse; The differences between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively led to a full-scale lawsuit and media controversy; And of course the charisma of Blake Lively. Alison Williams is a good actress, but she’s not Lively, she doesn’t have the clout or the huge fan base she and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, have.

Dave Franco, Makina Grace and Mason Thames don’t get a chance to shine here either; They are not to blame either, the screenplay seems to have come directly from the heart of the watery second-rate Turkish serials, and with hasty and rushed dialogues, it was written to be annoying. Of course, the main problem of “Regret You” is not caused by the script; It’s from Colin Hoover’s original story, and all the faults of his books are highlighted here: that it’s all smoke and mirrors and nothing more.

Even until the final moment, we still don’t understand what is the story that the director is really interested in telling – the story that should be the main pillar of the film. If the goal was to create a coming-of-age story centered on Clara and at the same time give us a love story between her mother and Jonah, it must be admitted that this amount of narrative confusion is admirable.

At the same time, zero to one hundred of Clara’s story lines are clichés: rebelliousness, tense relationship with her mother, first love, first experiences; We’ve seen it better in a thousand other teen movies. This is how Miller’s side hobby, moving the end of the city limits sign, becomes the most interesting part of the story. The funniest moments, however, are where the film tries to revive the feeling of “The Diary” (2004) and see how bad the situation is that I have to defend that film and the story written by Nicholas Sparks.

In literary studies – and cinema – we have a term called suspension of disbelief, which means that we, as the audience, consciously set aside our beliefs in order to connect with a story far from reality. The problem is that for a film like “Regret You”, you cannot do such a thing because it is based on human emotions and when the reactions of the characters are irrational, you cannot empathize with them by any measure. Anyone who has tasted betrayal in reality, or lost a loved one, will be confused by the reactions of the characters in this story. Look at Morgan, who has lost both her sister and her partner in the blink of an eye, and yet, except for a few extra glasses of wine, she’s perfectly sober, with no mental breakdowns or major falls.

Jonah apparently solves his psychological traumas by being absent for two days and abandoning his son (who may not be his son). And Clara? Except for his father’s funeral, which he cannot attend due to the severity of his grief, he continues to be a normal teenager, and does not look like someone who has lost two important people in his life. In other words, these characters are so superficially drawn that they can’t even portray someone who is involved in a tragedy.

Birth certificate of the movie “Regretting You”

Director: Josh Boone
Author: Susan McMartin
Cast: Alison Williams, Makina Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood
Product: 2025, USA, Germany
IMDb rating for the movie: 6 out of 10
Movie rating on Rotten Tomatoes: 27%
Synopsis: The story takes place around a love square. Jonah (Dave Franco) and Morgan (Allison Williams) are in love but can’t be together because Jonah is in a relationship with Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and Morgan is with Jonah’s best friend Chris (Scott Eastwood). Ironically, Jenny and Chris have a crush on each other. Things get complicated when Morgan becomes pregnant. 17 years later, Morgan and Chris, who are not related to each other, are married and have a grown child, Clara (Mackinna Grace). Jonah had also disappeared for years, returned and started a relationship with Jenny again until an accident messed everything up…

The review of the movie “Pishmani Oz To” is the author’s personal point of view and is not necessarily the position of Digikala Mag.

Source: Digikala Mag