REGRETTING YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

Regretting You, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2025

The philosophy of Regretting You, apparently, is not to let the tragic deaths of two characters and the emotionally fraught fallout of that tragedy get in the way of a pair of romances. This is such a tonally strange movie that it's a wonder the actors are able to play any of it with a straight face.

Then again, the screenplay by Susan McMartin, adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover, doesn't wait long after a car accident kills two people before it starts making predictable jokes. The dead people are Chris (Scott Eastwood)—a husband, father, and best friend—and Jenny (Will Fitzgerald)—a new mother, a fiancée, a sister, and an aunt. He's married to Morgan (Allison Williams), and she just had a child with and recently became engaged to Jonah (Dave Franco). The dramatically tantalizing setup is that their deaths, while in the same car, reveal to Morgan and Jonah that their partners were having an affair together.

This is about as big a melodramatic deal as one of these soapy, sappy stories could invent, but nothing really comes of it. Morgan starts drinking wine during the day while sitting on the couch watching reality television shows. Jonah occasionally stops by, sometimes so that Morgan can babysit but more often than not without his baby, and offers long stares or awkward admissions that he has loved Morgan since he met her back in high school (when all four looked exactly as they do 17 years later).

No one wants to talk about anything here, which could be seen as an honest depiction of grief—if not for the fact that the movie makes it feel as if those deaths are too necessary to more important things for anyone to think twice about them. Morgan and Chris' teenage daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace), for example, leaves her father's funeral, runs off with the guy she likes but who has an on-again-off-again thing going on with another girl, and smokes pot for the first time in his pickup truck.

It's all a joke as she starts coughing and, whoops, Morgan finds Clara by tracking her daughter's phone. The way the mother stares at Miller (Mason Thames), the boy Clara has a crush on, is the look of an overprotective mother in a cheesy sitcom, not the face of a woman who lost her husband and her sister and the belief that her entire life has been good in one fell swoop.

The rest of the movie just keeps playing in that tone, except when McMartin and director Josh Boone decide a bit of conflict is necessary and remember how all of this started. Clara and Miller start dating. Even though their future together is—but really isn't, as Clara unintentionally points out when she explains why Miller can go to their dream college and take care of his ailing grandfather (played by Clancy Brown)—up in the air, that's not quite enough drama.

Clara starts taking out her anger against her mother on the poor boy, who, thankfully for her, must have some undiagnosed issue with his short-term memory. Miller is quite insulted and outraged when Clara wants to have sex with him to get back at her mother, but the next morning, everything is just perfectly fine on his end again. The clichéd moment where Morgan finds her daughter and the boyfriend in bed together after nothing happened between them must have been quite the shock to Miller's system.

That romance is at least a little cute, mainly because Grace and Thames play it earnestly and are just young-enough actors to be forgiven for their lack of choosiness in material. As for Williams and Franco, they should know and have waited around for better. Williams does her best with a role that is all over the place, but Franco's performance has this little glimmer about it that makes one suspect he knows this is mostly junk. At one moment after a particularly saccharine one-liner, it almost looks as if the actor gives the subtlest of winks to just the side of the camera. That could just be wishful thinking or reading too much into a paycheck role, though.

Whatever the case, the movie doesn't care about grief or the complex emotional disaster that, again, it has very specifically established. Regretting You might as well have just had Chris and Jenny run off together for as little as their deaths actually matter to the characters or what the story does with that development. Considering how dull and routine their surviving partners' romance becomes, we might not have blamed them, either.

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