Review: REGRETTING YOU

 by Rob DiCristino

Gas leak cinema.

The 34th Philadelphia Film Festival is in full effect this week! Centerpiece film premieres include Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice, and my most personally anticipated film of the year, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. The festival will also feature celebrity appearances from Johnson, Lucy Liu, and Philadelphia’s own Bradley Cooper! There will be parties! Panels! Q&As! Food! Drink! Dance-offs! Forums with esteemed members of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle (Hey, I’m in that!)! The Philadelphia Film Society is also hosting filmmaker meet-ups and community outreach events for students interested in learning more about the film industry. From nascent beginnings, the PFF has truly grown into one of the most anticipated film events on the East Coast.

Anyway, we’ve been too busy to do any of that, so instead we went to a press screening of Regretting You, the new romantic drama based on the 2019 novel by It Ends with Us’ Colleen Hoover. Directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars, The New Mutants), Regretting You opens with soon-to-be graduates Morgan (a plastic, de-aged Allison Williams), Jonah (a plastic, de-aged Dave Franco), Jenny (A plastic, de-aged Willa Fitzgerald), and Chris (a plastic, de-aged Scott Eastwood) on their way to their latest beachside blowout. Because movies need conflicts, Morgan is dating doofy frat-bro Chris rather than the sensitive and intelligent Jonah — He also wears glasses, so add “mysterious” — who’s clearly settled for her sister Jenny as a consolation prize. Just as Jonah and Morgan seem poised to correct their error and bone down, Morgan reveals that she’s pregnant with Chris’ baby. Seventeen years later, their daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) navigates a romance with hunky cinephile Miller (Mason Thames).

There’s way more plot to summarize — Hint: two of these characters will be dead before we’re halfway through this 120-minute slog — but I’ll be damned if I’m going to work harder to make sense of Regretting You than screenwriter Susan McMartin ever did. Suffice to say that it’s a movie with a hole in its head, an incoherent tangle of cliches assembled with such disregard for tone, mood, and continuity that you’ll wonder if you’re actually just nodding off and waking back up during a marathon of Lifetime originals. Take Dave Franco’s Jonah: He skipped town after Morgan and Chris married, reappearing at some point to impregnate Jenny and start teaching at Clara’s high school (?). Their son Elijah is roughly a year old when Jonah and Morgan have their first conversion about these events (?), despite the fact that Morgan has been babysitting for them with some frequency (?). With these and other logistics left unexplored, Jonah’s major narrative function is stumbling into Morgan’s house at random intervals looking forlorn. Seriously, though. Try to keep track of how often it happens. You’ll lose count!

The character who comes closest to resembling a human being is probably Clara, if only because teenage behavior is, by definition, nonsensical and ill-informed. A veteran of the high school stage, Clara dreams of attending drama school, though her mother would prefer she find a more stable career. Don’t worry about it, because Morgan will eventually come around to supporting her daughter’s dream after watching a recording of a two-year-old performance that she presumably attended live in the first place (?). Morgan had to learn the value of pursuing her passions, I suppose, which she does by remodeling her kitchen and having sex with a man she had no tangible reason not to have sex with in the first place. But whatever; we’re talking about Clara. What’s good about Clara? Oh! She and Miller watch Clueless at one point during their Young Love Tropes speed run, reminding me that other, better movies still exist. What else? Well, Mckenna Grace is the only one who doesn’t look like she’s acting with a gun to her head, so if nothing else, Regretting You should help the Ghostbusters star secure more work.

Oh, shit. Before I forget: Regretting You does the Sherlock “text messages on the screen” thing, but then also has the characters narrate the messages in voice over. Who is that for? And why does it never occur to Clara that her father and aunt might have died in the same car accident — Ah, fuck it. Spoilers: Chris and Jenny were having an affair, and Chris likely fathered Elijah — until the very end of the movie? They died on the same day! Did she just never wonder about how that happened? Was Colleen Hoover hoping no one would notice that the central dramatic conceit of the entire story was faulty, or did she just think we’re all too stupid to care? Is there some sort of explanation in the book? Did anyone read this book? Am I going insane? Honestly, our audience was hooting and hollering when all this was “revealed,” so what the hell do I know about human behavior? Maybe this is actually the great romance of our time. Oh, wait! Guys! Clancy Brown is in this movie! No, I don’t know why. It couldn't matter less.

Regretting You hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 24th.