Nobody asked whether Hollywood had learned anything from its first two Colleen Hoover adaptations. The answer, it turns out, is: a little. Just enough to be interesting, not quite enough to be good.
It Ends with Us made $350 million in 2024 and is now remembered primarily as a celebrity dispute with a film attache
d to it. Regretting You came and went in 2025 without much fanfare. Now comes Reminders of Him, and the strangest thing about it is that it occasionally works. Not consistently, not boldly — but there are genuine moments here that neither predecessor managed to produce. That’s either progress or a very low bar, depending on your mood.
The Setup, Which Is Better Than the Film Deserves
Kenna Rowan has just walked out of prison after seven years. She was drunk. She drove. The man who died was her fiancé, Scott, and somewhere inside that wreckage is a daughter named Diem — now four years old and being raised by Scott’s parents, Grace and Patrick, who have made it their quiet mission to ensure Kenna stays as far from that child as legally possible.
It’s a genuinely ugly situation, the kind that doesn’t resolve neatly into heroes and villains. Grace and Patrick are grieving parents protecting a grandchild they love. Kenna is a woman who made a catastrophic choice and has now lost everything because of it, including the right to know her own daughter. There’s real dramatic terrain here — the question of what forgiveness actually costs, whether redemption can be performed or only earned, what a child owes the memory of a parent she never knew.
The film gestures toward all of this and then mostly sidesteps it in favour of the romance. Kenna meets Ledger — Scott’s best friend, now running a bar in town — and the two begin something they cannot tell anyone about, for reasons the film never quite makes convincing. Wyoming is beautiful. There are long walks. There are loaded glances across crowded rooms. You know where this is going because you’ve been here before.
What the Script Gets Wrong
The most persistent problem is Scott. For a film haunted entirely by his absence, he never becomes a person. We hear that he was beloved, that he was loyal, that he held people together. What we don’t get is any specific, human sense of who he actually was. This matters more than it might seem — without a felt understanding of who was lost, the grief surrounding him reads as obligation rather than emotion. Characters mourn on schedule.
Kenna is a more complicated case. The screenplay, which Hoover co-wrote with Lauren Levine, compresses an enormous amount of backstory into a first act that rushes and a third act that sprawls. Somewhere in that compression, Kenna’s interiority gets flattened. The film wants her to be sympathetic before she has done anything to earn our sympathy — and by protecting her so carefully from moral complexity, it accidentally makes her less interesting. She drove drunk and killed someone she loved. That is a fact the film treats as background detail rather than as the psychological wound it would actually be.
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The business of keeping the relationship secret is handled with a looseness that becomes distracting. This is a small town. These are people who share history, friends, local geography. The idea that nobody notices anything, that no mutual acquaintance asks an inconvenient question, belongs to a different kind of story — a fairy tale, perhaps, or a network drama with a generous continuity department.
Vanessa Caswill and the House Style Problem
Caswill is a capable director who made a genuinely good Little Women for the BBC in 2017. Her eye for landscape is evident here — she finds something wide and melancholy in Wyoming that the film’s emotional register never quite matches. The open skies and sparse light give the exterior scenes a gravity the interiors can’t sustain.
But there is a template operating underneath this film, and it overpowers the director’s individual instincts. The soundtrack leans on acoustic covers of familiar songs with the tempo slowed just enough to signal feeling. The lighting indoors is soft and flattering and completely uniform. Every emotional climax is shot in close-up with the camera barely moving. It is a grammar that has become so associated with a certain kind of prestige romance that it no longer communicates anything except genre — it’s cinematic shorthand that stopped being a choice and became a default.
The troubling thing is that all three Hoover films, shot by different teams, look and sound like the same movie. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a decision being made somewhere above the level of the directors involved.
Monroe, and Why She Saves the Film From Itself
Maika Monroe does something here that the film doesn’t quite deserve. She plays Kenna not as a symbol of wronged womanhood but as an actual person who is still figuring out who she is after seven years of having that question removed from the agenda. There’s a watchfulness to her performance — a way she scans rooms, hesitates before speaking, keeps her body slightly angled toward exits — that tells you more about the character’s psychology than any of the dialogue manages.
The moments between Kenna and Diem are the film’s best, and they work almost entirely because of what Monroe does with them. She never plays these scenes for maximum emotional effect. She holds back, and the restraint is devastating in a way the film’s louder moments never achieve.
Tyriq Withers has charm and handles the quieter scenes well, but Ledger is written too thinly to carry his half of the central relationship. He functions more as a mechanism for moving Kenna toward her daughter than as a character with an interior life of his own. Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford do what skilled character actors do — they make you understand people who behave badly for comprehensible reasons — and the film is better in every scene they’re in.
The Film It Could Have Been
Buried inside Reminders of Him is a smaller, stranger film about the specific grief of a mother who is legally prohibited from being a mother. The scenes in which Kenna orbits Diem’s life from a distance — watching her at a park, glimpsing her through the window of a bar — carry an ache that the romantic storyline never approaches. It’s the kind of subject matter mainstream cinema rarely touches with any seriousness: the intersection of criminal justice, custody law, and the basic human need to know your own child.
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That film exists in fragments here. It never gets to fully emerge, because the genre machinery keeps reasserting itself — the meet-cutes, the misunderstandings, the third-act confession scene that the audience has been expecting for forty minutes before it arrives. The result is a film at war with itself, and the more commercially viable half wins.
Final Verdict
Reminders of Him is the best argument yet that a Colleen Hoover adaptation can be made without embarrassment. It is also evidence of how much ground remains to be covered before any of these films qualifies as genuinely good. Monroe is exceptional and deserves better material. Caswill has an eye that’s being underused. The maternal grief storyline, whenever the film trusts it enough to let it run, is quietly devastating.
Everything else is familiar territory, travelled with competence and very little surprise.
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.