Regretting You (dir. Josh Boone)

by Jack Martin | Oct 25, 2025

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 116 mins

UK Distributor: Paramount Pictures

UK Release Date: 24 October 2025

WHO’S IN REGRETTING YOU?

Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood, Clancy Brown, Sam Morelos, Ethan Costanilla, Aubrey Brockwell

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Josh Boone (director), Susan McMartin (writer), Brunson Green, Robert Kulzer, Anna Todd and Flavia Viotti (producers), Nathaniel Walcott (composer), Tim Orr (cinematographer), Marc Clark and Robb Sullivan (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A mother (Williams) and daughter (Grace) come to terms with their shared grief…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON REGRETTING YOU?

It’s safe to say that the Colleen Hoover cinematic universe isn’t off to a flying start. The decency of It Ends with Us, adapted from the author’s most popular work, has been vastly overshadowed by behind-the-scenes drama involving star Blake Lively and co-star/filmmaker Justin Baldoni, which doesn’t look as though it’s going to cool down any time soon with legal proceedings currently set for early next year.

Worse still – though perhaps not quite as bad as what allegedly went down on the set of It Ends with Us – Regretting You, director Josh Boone’s take on Hoover’s 2019 novel, is a baffling trainwreck that, like the previous Hoover adaptation, is filled with good intentions but just as many wrong decisions that nullify the solid intent.

The film follows Morgan (Allison Williams), a thirty-something woman who, along with her husband and high school sweetheart Chris (Scott Eastwood), is raising their teenage daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace), while relying on her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), who along with her partner Jonah (Dave Franco) are new parents themselves, for valuable support. However, a car crash suddenly claims the lives of Chris and Jenny, rocking the worlds of their surviving partners and offspring, but while Clara deals with her grief by spending more time with handsome local boy and aspiring film student Miller (Mason Thames), Morgan and Jonah quickly discover the real reason why their late other halves were in the same car at the time of their deaths – and given the thinness of the script, so will you – and resolve to move on in spite of the enormous betrayal, possibly with each other.

In adapting Hoover’s story to the screen, Boone and screenwriter Susan McMartin have made between them a series of wildly miscalculated choices that turn what should be a straightforward weepie into an unintentionally funny disaster. For one, the movie opens with a brief prologue that makes the dunderheaded decision to digitally de-age its lead adult actors as high school versions of themselves, which is hilarious to imagine since none of them can really pass for teenagers at this point (even with all the off-putting CGI gloss), but even more so when you actually see the likes of Williams and Eastwood with heavily airbrushed looks that somehow make them feel a lot older than they’re supposed to be. They even do it again for another flashback later on, and it’s so distracting to a point where it completely takes you out of the movie for no reason, because God forbid, they spend that portion of the $30 million budget on casting more age-appropriate actors for these scenes.

The madness does not stop when they’re adults, because most of these characters are actually kind of terrible people. Beyond the extra-marital drama they’re dealing with, Morgan is an extremely suffocating mother who is extremely quick to judge some of the fellow teens that her daughter hangs out with, particularly Miller whose biggest crime is being the offspring of a convicted felon, while Jonah at one point up and abandons his infant son to just wallow in self-pity around his pizza box-littered house. This is apparently a universe where the adults behave like children and the children behave like adults – a notion that the otherwise trite dialogue at least has the decency to address, albeit briefly – since it’s Clara who’s often saddled with fixing some of her elders’ emotional problems while they’re busy destroying and throwing eggs at a painting that the late, cheating Chris bought that Morgan doesn’t like (which, putting aside the grief and anger of it all, that’s still a painting that someone probably worked extremely hard on before it was purchased). Even young Clara can be a bit of a terror, storming out of her father’s funeral to get high with Miller, whom she later manipulates into taking her virginity in a retaliatory action against her mother after catching her in a compromising position. At this point, the only one you feel sorry for in all of this is Miller, who’s been roped into all this excessive family drama with people who rarely take his own feelings into account.

Miller is also probably the only character who has it good for the entire film, for his own passion for movies becomes a source of comfort for himself and others, so long as the only ones we ever see or hear being mentioned are exclusively under Paramount’s umbrella. It’s no exaggeration to say that Regretting You is a covert advertisement for the studio itself, with Miller’s bedroom wall littered with movie posters of only Paramount movies like The Truman Show and Clear and Present Danger, while the AMC cinema he works at (another shameless bit of product placement, as though the chain was forced to find another spokesperson after Nicole Kidman finally escaped from its clutches) seems to just show the studio’s own releases such as Mission: Impossible, The Godfather and Clueless, with the opening chimes of their current logo playing before characters watch a private screening of the latter. If there wasn’t another movie this year where Ice Cube stopped an alien invasion through the power of Amazon’s drone delivery service, this would be some of the most egregious movie product placement in a long while.

It’s not even a well-made movie, as Tim Orr’s cinematography constantly makes it look like a direct-to-Netflix romantic drama instead of something you’d watch on the big screen, while the performances by an otherwise talented cast vary from bad to tonally off, with some like Williams treating the material like it’s a quirky Judd Apatow comedy rather than a full-on schmaltz fest. Boone, who previously directed the much better tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars, is aggressively on autopilot mode as he adapts Hoover’s story with a lazy point-and-shoot approach that fails to elevate McMartin’s cloying soap-opera writing which already overcomplicates a situation that could easily be resolved if any of these characters had a proper conversation with one another.

A confoundingly odd failure, only saved from half-star territory by a charismatic turn by Mckenna Grace (who, like most people involved, deserves far better material), Regretting You – or, more accurately, Paramount Presents Paramount’s Regretting You by Paramount – sets the benchmark even lower for Colleen Hoover adaptations, as if the legal woes behind her previous adaptation hadn’t already.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Regretting You is a bafflingly bad misfire that applies numerous ill-advised filmmaking and storytelling choices, from distracting de-aging effects to excessive product placement, to a narrative that’s already overloaded with sappy soap-opera plotting and terribly conceived characters that nullifies any and all good intent.