Regretting You is the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation to arrive with a lot of built-in melodrama and almost no ability to make that melodrama feel earned. After the infamous chaos surrounding It Ends With Us, I hoped this would at least land as a clean, competent tearjerker. Instead it plays limp and strangely confusing, a movie that keeps insisting it is devastating without ever giving the relationships enough shape for the devastation to hit.
The core setup should be catnip for this subgenre. Morgan, played by Allison Williams, and Jonah, played by Dave Franco, have an unspoken closeness that the film keeps at arm’s length, until a car accident kills Morgan’s husband and Jonah’s girlfriend. The tragedy also reveals that the two people who died were having an affair. Morgan and Jonah are left to process the betrayal and the grief at the same time, while Morgan’s daughter Clara, played by Mckenna Grace, tumbles into her own romantic storyline with her classmate Miller, played by Mason Thames. It is a lot of moving parts for a movie that never earns its big swings.
The first half is especially shaky. Relationships are sketched so quickly, and the time jumps are handled so clumsily, that it becomes hard to track who is connected to whom and why certain reveals are meant to matter. Even when you can follow the plot, you can feel how underdeveloped everything is. The movie wants you to mourn people you barely know, then pivot into healing and longing without the connective tissue that would make those emotional turns believable.
The performances do not save it. Allison Williams is the one actor consistently trying to hold the frame, grounding Morgan in something resembling real pain instead of Hallmark-level anguish. Dave Franco plays Jonah with a restless desperation that reads as exhausting rather than affecting. Mckenna Grace and Mason Thames have almost no chemistry, and their scenes feel like a different, flatter movie stapled onto the main story. When the young romance is supposed to add warmth and contrast, it only adds runtime.
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Josh Boone’s direction does not help. He proved with The Fault in Our Stars that he can navigate heightened young-adult emotion when the material has clarity and momentum. Here, the staging is inert and the tone is mushy, with none of the control you need to keep a story this corny from collapsing under its own weight. Boone’s career has been uneven, and this sits closer to the misfires than to his better instincts.
By the end, Regretting You feels like a stack of contrivances delivered with a straight face, then pushed into climaxes that land as noise. I can handle plenty of romance-movie nonsense, but this one is so thinly built that the sadness never becomes catharsis. It is not just bad, it is baffling in how little it works given the cast and the premise. A late-year contender for the most draining studio melodrama I saw in 2025.
Score: 2/10
Regretting You (2025)
- Cast: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, Clancy Brown
- Director: Josh Boone
- Genre: Drama, Romance
- Runtime: 116 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: October 24, 2025
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