Regretting You Review: This Allison Williams & Dave Franco Romance Is A Sorrowful Snooze You'll Regret Seeing

Imagine finding out in the same breath that your husband has been having a long-term affair with your sister, that both of them are now dead from a car accident, and that your nephew’s paternity is in serious doubt. This is the wild reality for Morgan (Allison Williams) in Regretting You. It is also the kind of treacly plotting that has been the norm for both filmmaker Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) and author Colleen Hoover (It Ends With Us), whose novel of the same name is adapted here by Susan McMartin with, ironically, a distinct lack of feeling. Despite the grandiose tragedy that befalls Morgan, her daughter, and her brother-in-law, Jonah (an almost impressively lifeless Dave Franco), Regretting You is a placid, glacial snooze.

Belonging, as it does, to a subgenre of young adult texts whose success is predicated on its ability to manipulate emotions, Regretting You gets nowhere near the sentimental fever-pitch of its predecessors. That may be a good thing if you’d like this type of stuff to be subtler than it is, but Boone’s film is not so much subtle as it is boring.

You’ll Probably Regret Seeing Regretting You

There is something interesting about the film’s non-sliding doors setup, in which characters are locked into choices they wish they could have redone. Morgan and Joshua are high school pals whose feelings for each other are tamped down by their choice of the wrong partner. While Morgan finds herself with party guy jock Chris (Scott Eastwood), Jonah sleepily dates her sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald). The year is 2007, The Killers have just released “When You Were Young,” and the foursome has graduated. Just at the moment that Jonah is going to confess his real love to Morgan, she tells him she is pregnant by Chris.

Cut to 17 years later, and both couples are still together. We learn that, after graduation, Jonah disappeared for nearly all of those intervening years, until suddenly reappearing at Morgan and Jenny’s father’s funeral. The two got together, had a baby, and are looking forward to getting married. Jonah is a school teacher and Jenny is a nurse now on maternity leave. Morgan and Chris, meanwhile, raise their fiercely independent daughter whose aspirations for a life on the stage are looked at askance by her mother who fears for her financial future.

The real meat of the film begins after Chris and Jenny suddenly die in a car accident, and their deaths raise the question of just what they were doing together. The obvious conclusion is somehow over the head of young Clara, who spends the bulk of the film in her grief, assuming her father and aunt were saints. Morgan refuses to tell her the truth. So much of the film’s tension is dependent on Clara not knowing the truth of their affair, but it is such a head-scratcher: hasn’t she wondered at all how they died on the same day? Regardless, the rest of the film is an airless rumination on familial grief as Morgan, Jonah, and Clara each digest the situation in their own ways.

Boone and McMartin handle their characters’ respective grief with kid gloves. The conflict in the film is exceedingly staid. Even when Morgan and Clara fight, their arguments never tilt into the dangerous, nor are they all that mean. Williams’ acting is severely wanting. She’s not totally unbelievable, but she definitely is not readable as someone who is going through the bizarre grief of having lost a husband and a sister, and certainly doesn’t seem to acknowledge the added rottenness of learning of their long affair.

Franco, meanwhile, is a complete waste on the screen. It is never not surprising just how terrible a performance he gives, a man reliant on biting his lower lip to showcase apparent sadness, longing, or anger. He speaks in squeaky whispers, and nearly all of his line deliveries are completely insincere and awkward. Thank goodness for Mckenna Grace, who is a ray of sunshine and the film’s only strand of sincerity. Her Clara is temperamental but also headstrong; she straddles the line well between normal high schooler and a budding adult facing uncommon circumstances.

Having said that, Clara’s relationship with aspiring filmmaker Miller (Mason Thames) is frustratingly generic and does not act as the counterbalance to Morgan and Jonah it is meant to be. That the film feels like an overlong commercial may be due in part to the televisual lighting, but it could also be that a sizable amount of Clara and Miller’s scenes take place at an AMC where the latter works. With AMC emblazoned everywhere, you’d think you were watching an extended promo for the theater chain.

Boone’s lack of cinematic wherewithal is punctuated by an overuse of texts. It is astonishing how many scenes in the film hinge on characters texting, with animated bubbles; adding a voiceover to the same messages does not make it more interesting. It only accentuates the fundamental flaw of Regretting You, which is that no one is connecting in any conceivable human way. Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.