Allison Williams, Clancy Brown, Dave Franco, drama, Josh Boone, Mason Thames, Mckenna Grace, movies, North Carolina, Regretting You, reviews, Ryan Conner Simmons, Sam Morelos, Scott Eastwood, William Burnham Simmons
October 22, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Josh Boone
Culture Representation: Taking place in the fictional city of Dylan, North Carolina, in 2024 and 2025 (with flashbacks to 2007), the dramatic film “Regretting You” (based on the novel of the same name) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Asian people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A recent widow finds out that her husband and her sister, who died in a car crash together, were having an affair with each other, and the widow’s teenage daughter rebels against her by dating a fellow student against her mother’s wishes.
Culture Audience: “Regretting You” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the book on which the movie is based, and corny melodramas about “difficult” romances.
“Regretting You” is the cinematic equivalent of an overstuffed Baked Alaska. Even with a talented cast, this drama’s tone is too sugary for the subject matter of finding love during grief. A soap-opera-length story is crammed into a feature-length film. The last 15 minutes of the movie are especially horrible at how the movie glosses over and neatly wraps up difficult traumas and messy life transitions.
Directed by Josh Boone and written by Susan McMartin, “Regretting You” is adapted from Colleen Hoover’s 2019 novel of the same name. The movie takes place in the fictional small city of Dylan, North Carolina. (Dylan’s population is a little more than 38,000 people.) “Regretting You” was actually filmed in the Georgia cities of Atlanta and Decatur. Even though most of the characters in the movie grew up in North Carolina, no one in this movie’s cast sounds like they’re from North Carolina. It’s not the only thing in the movie that looks phony.
“Regretting You” begins with a flashback to 2007, when two high-school couples go on a double date to a beach party. Traditional “good girl” Morgan Davidson (played by Allison Williams) and her free-spirited younger sister Jenny Davidson (played by Willa Fitzgerald) are at the party with their respective boyfriends. Morgan’s boyfriend is confident and popular Chris Grant (played by Scott Eastwood), while Jenny’s boyfriend is quiet and slightly nerdy Jonah Sullivan (played by Dave Franco), who is secretly in love with Morgan. Chris, Morgan and Jonah are in their last year of high school, while Jenny is either in her second or third year of high school.
Morgan seems to be aware that she and Jenny have ended up with boyfriends who have personalities that are the opposites of who Morgan and Jenny are. Morgan says so when she jokingly asks Jonah, “How did we end up with our opposites?” Chris is a little bit rude to Morgan when he tells her that he likes her better when she’s drunk. At this party, there’s something else that’s occupying Morgan’s thoughts that’s bigger than Chris’ disrepectful remark. Before going to the party, Morgan took a home pregnancy test and found out that she’s pregnant.
“Regretting You” then fast-forwards 17 years later to 2024. Morgan (whose last name is now Grant) and Chris are now the married parents of 16-year-old Clara Grant (played by Mckenna Grace), who wants to become an actress. The movie never really shows Clara making much of an effort to be an actress, exept for a few brief clips of her reciting lines. Conversations in the movie reveal that Morgan and Chris got married not long after they found out that Morgan was pregnant.
Meanwhile, Jonah is now a teacher at Dylan High School, his alma mater. After he graduated from high school, Jonah moved away and cut off contact with his friends from high school. When Jonah’s father died, Jonah came back to Dylan to attend the funeral.
Jonah and Jenny reconnected at the funeral, they had a sexual encounter, and she got pregnant with their infant son Elijah from that encounter. (The role of baby Elijah is played by twins William Burnham Simmons and Ryan Conner Simmons.) Jonah and Jenny began dating again after this unplanned pregnancy. Jonah moved back to Dylan, he and Jenny moved in together, and they have recently gotten engaged.
The present-day scenes begin with these family members gathered for Morgan’s birthday party, except for Clara, who is running late. Clara is driving on a road when she sees Miller Adams (played by Mason Thames), the schoolmate she’s had a crush on for quite some time. Miller is in on the side of the road and holding a Dylan city limit sign. He indicates that he’s looking for a car ride, so Clara stops.
Miller explains that he needs help moving the sign because his favorite pizza place won’t deliver outside Dylan’s city limits. Miller lives just right outside of Dylan, so he’s been moving the city limit sign so that pizza can get delivered to the house where Dylan lives with his widower grandfather Hank Adams Sr. (played by Clancy Brown), who has some respiratory-related health issues. (Hank is seen wearing oxygen tubes.) It’s later revealed that Hank has cancer.
Clara is secretly thrilled that she’s talking to Miller, who seems to like her too. Miller has a girlfriend named Shelby, who graduated from their high school the year before. Shelby is never seen in the movie, but she frequently calls Miller to check up on him because she’s a nagging and jealous girlfriend. Miller and Clara mildly flirt with each other while pretending that they’re not romantically attracted to each other. And you know what that eventually means in a movie like “Regretting You.”
During their conversation in the car, Clara (who is a high-achieving student) finds out that Miller (who is an average student) is an aspiring filmmaker. Clara tells him that she wants to be an actress, but Clara’s mother Morgan thinks that Clara should choose a more stable career. Clara says that she applied to a drama school anyway because she wants to go to this school instead of a regular university. Clara encourages Miller to pursue his filmmaking dreams.
Clara tells Miller she’s in a hurry to get to her mother’s birthday party. During this sign relocation, one of Clara’s flip-flop shoes accidentally falls into some mud. After they finish what they set out to do with the city limit sign, Miller asks Clara to give him a car ride back to his place. He introduces her to his grandfather and gives her $10 to buy a new set of flip-flops. After Clara leaves, she’s elated to see that Miller has started following her on social media.
Morgan is annoyed that Clara is late to the party. Morgan is also concerned that Clara was with Miller because Miller’s father Hank Adams Jr. is in prison for drug dealing. Miller’s mother died when Miller was a child. Miller is a student of Jonah, who assures Morgan that Miller is a good kid. Morgan isn’t entirely convinced and wants Clara to date someone who comes from a family that doesn’t have the stigma of having a convicted criminal in the family.
Morgan quickly forgives Clara now that the family is all together for the birthday party. It seems like a picture-perfect party, but things are not always what they appear to be. Clara’s relationship with Morgan is somewhat strained because she thinks Morgan is too strict and controlling. Clara confides in Jenny more than Morgan about Clara’s personal life. Clara also feels emotionally closer to her father Chris than with Morgan.
As already revealed in the “Regretting You” trailer, tragedy strikes the family shortly after this birthday party. Chris and Jenny are killed in a car accident where Chris was driving. Jenny and Chris had lied to their family members, by saying they would be at their respective jobs at the time of the accident. The fact that Chris and Jenny were in the same car at the time of the accident is an indication that they were having an affair.
Jonah and Morgan later find proof of this affair. At first, Morgan is more in denial about it than Jonah is, but they both eventually accept the awful truth. Morgan is afraid of Clara finding out this scandalous secret, so she and Jonah agree not to tell Clara. Meanwhile, Clara and Miller get emotionally closer to each other. Jonah and Morgan also become closer, as Jonah encourages Morgan to revive her career aspirations to be an interior designer.
“Regretting You” is a movie that has no suspense whatsoever about what’s going to happen. (The movie’s trailer gives away almost the entire plot.) And although the principal cast members do the best they can, the screenplay they have to work with meanders and stumbles in many places.
The movie’s comic relief usually comes with the character of Clara’s best friend Lexie (played by scene-stealer Sam Morelos), who is more worldly than virgin Clara. Lexie has some one-liners that are laugh-out-loud funny. Other lines of dialogue from other characters are unintentionally funny because they’re so corny and cringeworthy. The movie clumsily struggles to blend the joys of new romance with the sadness of grief.
One of the biggest failings of “Regretting You” is how it makes the grieving process so trivial and overshadowed, in service of having four people rush into romances not long after the deaths of Chris and Jenny. In real life, there’s no official timeline on how long it should take to grieve the death of a loved one, but it seems like the movie’s priorities are warped. For example, later in the movie, Clara gets more upset about being grounded by Morgan than Clara is upset about losing her father and her aunt: the two people whom Clara admired most in life.
The movie has a sappy teen romance that’s forced into a story where family grief becomes just another sidelined plot device. Even worse is how “Regretting You” handles the changing relationship between Morgan and Jonah. This is the type of movie where certain people decide that they’re in love with each other after kissing each other for the first time. It all looks so fake, no matter how much the cast members try to be convincing. (Grace and Franco fare the best in their acting performances.) “Regretting You” is ultimately more interested in schmaltz than substance and has many questionable and eye-rolling choices that oversimplify what would be a painful mess in the real world.
Paramount Pictures will release “Regretting You” in U.S. cinemas on October 24, 2025.