TL;DR: Regretting You tries to balance tragedy and romance but ends up doing neither justice. McKenna Grace and Mason Thames shine in an otherwise lifeless adaptation that never digs deeper than a YA Tumblr quote. It’s not regrettable, exactly — just forgettable.
Regretting You
There’s a very specific kind of chaos that erupts when a Colleen Hoover book hits the screen. It’s like watching a Hallmark movie get hijacked by a fever dream from Euphoria. “Regretting You,” the latest Hoover adaptation following the messy but viral success of It Ends With Us, tries to walk that tightrope between emotional catharsis and high-gloss melodrama. Instead, it loses its footing and falls face-first into the cliché pile — and not even the combined wattage of McKenna Grace (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) and Mason Thames (The Black Phone) can pull it out.
This isn’t to say “Regretting You” is unwatchable — far from it. It’s just that for a film about grief, love, and betrayal, it’s oddly allergic to feelings deeper than “mildly inconvenienced.”
Let’s unpack the dysfunction, shall we?
Imagine if Parenthood, Riverdale, and a deleted subplot from Days of Our Lives all decided to share a bottle of red wine and trauma-dump on each other. That’s “Regretting You.”
The movie kicks off with Morgan (Allison Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood), high school sweethearts who find out they’re expecting right before graduation. Cue 17 years later: they’re married, their daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) is college-bound, and life seems fine — which, in Colleen Hoover land, means disaster is about five minutes away.
And disaster comes in hot. A tragic car accident kills both Chris and Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald). What follows is a grief spiral laced with scandal: turns out, Chris and Jenny were having an affair. So, yes — Morgan’s husband was cheating on her with her little sister. And Jenny’s partner Jonah (Dave Franco)? He’s been in love with Morgan since high school.
It’s the kind of melodrama that could fuel a full season of Grey’s Anatomy, but here it’s crammed into two hours of restrained, oddly polite chaos.
Here’s the twist no one expected — the adults aren’t the heart of this story. That honor belongs to Clara (Grace) and her quietly magnetic boyfriend Miller (Mason Thames), who have more chemistry in one shared glance than the adults manage in the entire runtime.
Their teenage romance — full of stolen kisses, barnyard dates, and late-night movie marathons — feels like the movie’s one authentic emotional thread. Grace and Thames capture that beautiful, reckless phase of being seventeen: half nostalgia, half defiance. They’re the kind of couple you root for because they make the movie’s otherwise overcooked emotional beats feel… real.
Meanwhile, Morgan and Jonah’s so-called “second-chance romance” plays out like two coworkers awkwardly trying to flirt over a spreadsheet. Williams and Franco are capable actors, but the script gives them nothing to work with beyond “grief makes us horny.” Their scenes lack the spark or tension that the premise promises. For a pair supposedly nursing a 17-year emotional slow burn, their rekindled love story lands with the heat of a damp candle.
Here’s the thing: a story about loss and betrayal only hits hard if the grief feels earned. In “Regretting You,” it doesn’t. The movie treats death less like a seismic emotional event and more like a necessary plot coupon to get our characters from Point A (domestic stability) to Point B (forbidden attraction).
We never really feel the absence of Chris or Jenny — they’re narrative ghosts, existing only in dialogue and exposition. There’s no exploration of what made these relationships meaningful, which makes the fallout from their betrayal feel more like gossip than tragedy.
Even Clara, who loses both a father and an aunt, is forced to process her emotions in sound bites. Her grief becomes shorthand for rebellion: storming out, kissing boys, and yelling “You don’t understand me, Mom!” like it’s 2005. Grace does what she can to ground it, but the script seems terrified of letting anyone truly hurt.
If The Fault in Our Stars made you cry and My Girl permanently scarred your emotional core, “Regretting You” will make you shrug and check your phone.
McKenna Grace continues to prove she’s one of the most versatile young actors working today. She brings a layered vulnerability to Clara, balancing teenage angst with the weariness of someone forced to grow up too soon. Mason Thames, too, has leading-man energy to spare. His scenes with Grace are natural and unforced — you almost wish the entire film had been about them.
On the adult side, Williams and Franco are fine, if underserved. Williams still carries that steely fragility she brought to Get Out, while Franco’s quiet sincerity almost works — until the film reduces him to “sad guy who used to be hot.” Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald? They do their best with limited screentime, but they exist mostly as narrative grenades thrown into the family dynamic.
And then there’s Clancy Brown, playing Miller’s grandfather — the one adult character who feels like he wandered in from a better, more lived-in movie. Every scene he’s in briefly reminds you what emotional depth looks like before the story rushes off to the next love triangle.
Visually, Regretting You looks… fine. The cinematography is clean and the lighting is the usual “rom-dramedy beige” that modern streaming dramas love. But there’s a weird tonal limbo throughout. One moment, it’s trying to be The Spectacular Now. The next, it’s pure Riverdale melodrama — minus the self-awareness.
Paramount clearly wants this to be the “safe” Colleen Hoover adaptation, one you can take your mom to without awkwardly explaining trauma bonding. But in sanding down the edges, the film loses the rawness that made Hoover’s fanbase so rabid in the first place. This story should ache; instead, it simmers politely.
There’s a good movie somewhere inside Regretting You — a bittersweet meditation on family, forgiveness, and finding love after loss. Unfortunately, what we get is a glossy, over-sanitized melodrama that mistakes exposition for emotion.
McKenna Grace and Mason Thames give the film its only pulse, but they’re trapped in a script that treats grief like set dressing and romance like a math problem to solve. Colleen Hoover fans might find just enough angst to tide them over until the next adaptation drops, but everyone else will be left wondering why these stories always feel so hollow once they hit the screen.
