Regretting You

The Glossy Ruins of Grief

There is a specific frequency of emotional devastation that director Josh Boone once tuned into with perfect clarity. In *The Fault in Our Stars* (2014), he managed to transmute the "sick-lit" genre into something that felt deceptively like a raw, human document. Eleven years later, Boone returns to the architecture of tragedy with *Regretting You*, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestseller. Yet, where his earlier work felt like a ragged breath, *Regretting You* feels like a hyperventilating panic attack occurring inside a pristine, sun-drenched Pottery Barn catalog. It is a film that desperately wants to be messy but is far too polished to let any real dirt stick to its characters.

The narrative premise is a nesting doll of soap opera calamities: Morgan (Allison Williams) and her teenage daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) are left reeling when a car accident kills Morgan’s husband and her sister, only for the wreckage to reveal that the deceased pair were having a long-term affair. It is the kind of double-betrayal that demands a gritty, claustrophobic psychological study. Instead, Boone and cinematographer Tim Orr offer us a visual landscape that is aggressively, almost offensively, clean. The grief in *Regretting You* does not look like grief; it looks like a high-end lifestyle brand activation. The lighting is golden-hour eternal; the kitchens are impeccably staged even amidst emotional collapse. When Morgan discovers the physical evidence of the affair—a trove of love letters—the subsequent release of rage, involving the smashing of a truck, feels less like a primal scream and more like a carefully choreographed beat in a music video.

This visual sterilization creates a strange friction with the performances, which are striving for a realism the camera refuses to grant them. Allison Williams, an actress capable of terrifying precision (*Get Out*, *M3GAN*), is tasked here with playing a woman who is essentially evaporating. She does her best to ground Morgan’s spiraling neuroticism, but the script often reduces her to a series of reactive gasps. The film’s true pulse is found in Mckenna Grace. As Clara, Grace manages to salvage the "angsty teen" trope from the jaws of caricature. Her chemistry with Mason Thames (playing Miller, the boy next door with his own burdens) provides the film’s only genuine oxygen. In their scenes—awkward, tentative, and blissfully free of the adult melodrama—we see flashes of the director Boone used to be: an observer of the tender, excruciating process of growing up.

Ultimately, *Regretting You* suffers from the constraints of the "Colleen Hoover Cinematic Universe," a burgeoning genre where trauma is often treated as a plot device rather than a transformative event. The film relies heavily on miscommunication—that most frustrating of narrative crutches—to keep its characters apart, rather than genuine psychological barriers. By the time the inevitable reconciliations arrive, they feel unearned, smoothed over by the same glossy finish that coated the tragedy. Boone has delivered a competent, serviceable tearjerker that will undoubtedly satisfy the source material’s fervent fanbase, but for the neutral observer, it remains a beautiful, hollow structure—a monument to grief where no one is actually allowed to bleed.