Regretting You movie review: Tries to make you cry but barely makes you care…
Josh Boone leans too heavily on superficial romance and visual polish, resulting in a movie that feels more like a formula than a feeling.
Director: Josh Boone
Starring: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald and Clancy Brown
Rating: ★
After the success of It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover’s novels have become Hollywood’s latest obsession. Riding that wave, Regretting You arrives with high expectations, directed by Josh Boone — the filmmaker behind The Fault in Our Stars. Despite an impressive cast led by Allison Williams, Dave Franco, McKenna Grace, and Scott Eastwood, Regretting You never quite settles into the story it wants to tell.
The film opens in the past, showing a group of high-schoolers navigating love and difficult choices. Morgan (Allison Williams) is dating Chris (Scott Eastwood) when she discovers she’s pregnant. Her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) is with Jonah (Dave Franco), who secretly has feelings for Morgan. These tangled relationships set the stage for everything that follows. Seventeen years later, Morgan and Chris are married, raising their teenage daughter Clara (McKenna Grace), while Jenny and Jonah are starting a new chapter with their own child. Everything seems calm until tragedy strikes — a car crash that kills Chris and Jenny, revealing an affair that had been going on between them. What follows is a story of loss, betrayal, and complicated love as Morgan and Jonah face their grief while Clara turns away from her mother and into the arms of Miller (Mason Thames), the popular boy at school.
The good
There are moments in the film that show flashes of the emotional film it could have been. Allison anchors the story with sincerity, bringing real feeling to Morgan’s conflicting emotions — anger, guilt, heartbreak, and the instinct to hold her family together. Dave Franco complements her well, finding small but genuine moments of warmth and regret. McKenna also shines as Clara, capturing the raw confusion of a teenager caught between rebellion and vulnerability. Josh's direction occasionally delivers visual poetry, particularly in the film’s quiet lakeside scenes, which recall the bittersweet tone of classic YA romances. The soundtrack, filled with soft guitar scores and nostalgic piano cues, fits the film’s melancholy mood. For a brief while, it feels like Regretting You might find its rhythm.
The bad
But those moments are fleeting. From the very start, the de-aged flashback sequences feel off — the adult cast playing teens never looks convincing, and the film struggles to recover from that awkward beginning. The dual narrative, split between Morgan’s grief and Clara’s romance, makes the tone uneven. Josh and screenwriter Susan McMartin seem unsure whether they’re making a serious family drama or a teen love story, and the result is a movie that doesn’t fully commit to either.
The subplot between Clara and Miller, meant to mirror her mother’s past, feels shallow and distracts from the more compelling adult storyline. Their chemistry is underwhelming, and the overuse of text-message montages only adds to the artificiality. Even the emotional core — the fallout of betrayal — is handled too lightly, glossing over what could have been deeply affecting material. Add in the unnecessary product placements and a few tone-deaf comic bits, and the film begins to lose focus entirely.
The verdict
Regretting You is filled with the promise of emotion but delivers mostly surface-level drama. Josh, who once brought tenderness to The Fault in Our Stars, seems caught between tones here — too sentimental for realism, too restrained for melodrama. There’s sincerity in its intentions, but the film never reaches for anything beyond the familiar. What could have been a moving story about forgiveness and family instead feels glossy and hollow. In the end, Regretting You isn’t is just a forgettable adaptation that proves not every Colleen Hoover story warrants a jump to the big screen.
