Colleen Hoover adaptations are quickly becoming their own mini-genre: emotional whiplash, complicated love stories, and the kind of family pain that sits in your chest long after the credits. Regretting You (directed by Josh Boone) leans into that formula with zero shame. It is a glossy, soapy drama about grief and betrayal, anchored by a strained mother-daughter relationship that keeps trying to find solid ground.
It is also the rare movie where you can understand, in real time, why critics and audiences landed in two completely different places. If you want catharsis and big swings, there’s a lot here to latch onto. If you want subtlety, this one is going to feel like it is shouting from the next room.
What the Movie Is About (Spoiler-light)
The story centers on Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and her teenage daughter Clara (McKenna Grace). After a sudden tragedy rips their family apart, they are forced to deal with two kinds of grief at once: the loss itself, and what the loss reveals. Secrets spill out, loyalties get tested, and their already-complicated relationship turns into a constant push and pull between “I need you” and “I can’t stand you right now.”
Running alongside that is a young-love storyline for Clara with Miller (Mason Thames), plus an adult romance thread involving Jonah (Dave Franco), someone with deep history in Morgan’s life. The movie is juggling generational parallels on purpose, asking whether love is something you choose, something that happens to you, or something you survive.
The Performances Are the Reason It Works as Often as It Does
Allison Williams is the engine. Morgan is written as a tightly-wound, control-the-chaos kind of person, and Williams plays her as someone who is constantly bracing for impact even before impact arrives. When the story finally gives her space to fully break, it lands because she has been holding tension in her body the entire time.
McKenna Grace is also doing a lot of heavy lifting. Clara can easily come off as frustrating on paper, because teen grief often looks like anger and bad decisions. Grace makes Clara feel less like a plot device and more like a kid trying to translate pain into anything she can actually act on. She is at her best in the quieter moments where the emotion is obvious, but the character doesn’t have the words yet.
Dave Franco is a slightly unexpected fit for this kind of earnest melodrama, but he gives Jonah a low-key warmth that helps soften the movie’s sharper edges. Mason Thames plays Miller with an understated sincerity that the movie badly needs, because if that character tips into “perfect boyfriend fantasy,” the whole teen romance thread collapses. He keeps it grounded.
Clancy Brown, in a smaller supporting role, brings a natural presence that makes the family world feel more lived-in. The movie benefits whenever it lets supporting characters simply exist instead of racing to the next emotional checkpoint.
Josh Boone Knows How to Sell Emotion, Even When It Gets Loud
Josh Boone has a track record with heightened YA-adjacent romance (The Fault in Our Stars is the obvious point of comparison), and Regretting You plays like a filmmaker who understands exactly what kind of audience he is aiming for. The movie wants you to feel everything. It is not interested in “maybe.” It wants tears, anger, relief, and that slightly exhausted calm you get after an ugly cry.
The downside is that the movie can feel like it is stacking climaxes on top of climaxes. When everything is presented as a peak moment, the peaks start to blur together. There are stretches where the pacing feels less like a rising emotional arc and more like a highlight reel of blow-ups, revelations, and reconciliations.
Visually, it leans toward clean, safe drama aesthetics: attractive lighting, polished surfaces, and a contemporary-romance vibe. That works for accessibility, but it also contributes to the feeling that the movie is sometimes smoother than the mess it is trying to portray.
The Tone Swings Are Real, and Your Mileage Will Vary
This is the core “either you’re in or you’re out” element.
Regretting You moves between grief drama, romantic comedy beats, teen coming-of-age, and soap opera twistiness. On a good sequence, that mix can feel true to life. Real grief is not consistent. People do laugh at the wrong time. People do flirt while their world is on fire because they want one normal breath.
On the weaker sequences, the transitions can feel abrupt, like the movie is changing genres mid-scene. The story will ask you to sit in something devastating, and then quickly pivot into lighter, cuter material. Some viewers will find that human and relieving. Others will find it jarring, like the film is rushing past the hard parts to get to the romantic payoff.
The Mother-Daughter Thread Is the Best Part
When the movie focuses on Morgan and Clara, it sharpens. Their conflict is not just “we fight because we’re different.” It is “we fight because we are the only two people left who can hurt each other like this.”
The strongest idea Regretting You has is that betrayal doesn’t land the same way for a spouse and a child, even when they are grieving the same person. Morgan’s grief is tangled up with adult reality: marriage, history, compromise, regret. Clara’s grief is tangled up with identity: who she thought her family was, and what that means about her own life.
That’s rich territory, and when the movie slows down enough to let that tension breathe, it earns its emotional moments instead of forcing them.
The Romance Works, but It Is Not the Main Event
The teen romance between Clara and Miller is sweet in a very “first love feels like oxygen” way, and it is clearly designed to provide contrast against the adult messiness. It is also where the movie risks slipping into fantasy. The more the film relies on montages and cute beats to sell their bond, the less room it leaves for the relationship to feel specific.
Morgan and Jonah’s thread is more complicated and, frankly, more interesting on a character level, but it also carries the burden of the movie’s biggest moral questions. If you like romances that are a little uncomfortable because they force you to think about timing, grief, and emotional dependence, you’ll have more patience for it. If you want a cleaner love story, this is where the movie may lose you.
Why Critics Were Harsh and Audiences Were Kinder
The broad split makes sense.
If you are judging Regretting You as a film that should be restrained, layered, and tonally consistent, it is easy to see why it rubbed some critics the wrong way. The storytelling is broad. The emotions are turned up. The screenplay sometimes pushes characters into dramatic choices faster than real life would.
If you are judging it as a crowd-pleasing tearjerker designed to make you feel seen, it absolutely delivers that experience. It is built for viewers who want a movie to grab them by the heart, shake out the pain, and hand them something hopeful at the end.
Who Should Watch It
You’ll probably have a good time if:
- You like Colleen Hoover’s brand of heightened romance and trauma-driven drama
- You want something emotionally direct rather than subtle
- You are here for complicated family relationships more than plot perfection
You might want to skip it if:
- Tonal consistency matters a lot to you
- You are sensitive to melodrama or rapid-fire emotional escalation
- You prefer your grief stories quieter and more observational
Final Take
Regretting You is messy on purpose, sometimes messy by accident, but rarely boring. The acting, especially from Allison Williams and McKenna Grace, gives the story enough emotional credibility to survive its bigger swings. It is not a delicate film, and it is not trying to be. If you meet it where it is, it can be a solid, cathartic watch, especially if you go in wanting a mother-daughter drama first and a romance second.
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