It’s highly likely that people who went to watch Josh Boone’s “Regretting You” (2025) knew exactly what they were getting into. Boone’s film is yet another adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel, which means it comes with its own brand of mainstream, syrupy simplicity. It touches on some weighty themes of heartbreak and grief, but handles them with appalling immaturity to the point you question why they are being introduced in the first place.
On the surface, the film is about a teenager trying to build a healthy relationship with her mother while grieving the loss of her father and aunt. Yet, instead of addressing her coming-of-age journey with any form of thematic depth or sincerity, it sticks to genre cliches and remains largely derivative. It’s the kind of film that may remind you of every other rom-com you have seen, only because they have done what it does, but better.
Spoilers Ahead
Regretting You (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Written by Susan McMartin and directed by Josh Boone, “Regretting You” follows a teenager who goes on a quest to rediscover herself after a tragic loss of her loved ones.
What happens in Regretting You?
Clara (McKenna Grace), a 16-year-old girl, lives with her parents, Morgan (Allison Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood), in a town that is cozy for her present but not enough for her future. She hopes to leave home to study dramatic arts, despite knowing that it won’t help her land a stable job. There’s someone else in her town who wants to take this less-travelled artistic road. Miller (Mason Thames), who attends her school, wants to study film, even if the chances of success in that field are few and far between. One day, he bumps into her when she is driving back home. He stands next to a local signpost, hoping to uproot and place it somewhere else. Why? Because he wants to order pizzas, and the signpost reveals the delivery limits.
Seeing him on the side of the road, Clara parks her car and helps him. She also offers him a ride back home. On the way, he speaks with his girlfriend on the phone, but lies about Clara. He says a dude is driving him home. That fleeting interaction is enough for them to fall for each other. Sadly, her life back home isn’t that sweet and simple.
She has a strained relationship with her mother, but not with her aunt, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), whom she treats like her close friend. She shares all her secrets with Jenny, not Morgan, which breaks the latter’s heart. Morgan doesn’t seem content in her marriage either. She may look happy, but deep down, she is interested in Jenny’s husband, Jonah (Dave Franco), who could have been her partner only if they had acted on their impulses two decades ago.
The Loss and the Family Secret
Clara doesn’t know about Morgan and Jonah’s past, nor does she know anything about Jenny and Chris’s relationship. It all comes to the surface after Jenny and Chris die in a car accident. Morgan and Jonah arrive at the hospital at the same time to realize that their spouses were in the same car. Somehow, the next thought that pops into their mind is of their extramarital affair, as if that’s the only reason two adults would be in the same car. The script doesn’t explain why they reach that conclusion so quickly. It just wants us to pity them for their sudden heartbreak. Later, at Chris’s funeral, the lens shifts to Clara. The pain weighs so much on her chest that she walks out. Miller, who happens to be at the funeral, follows her and sits next to her.
Before that, they were busy figuring out the social media etiquette. He followed her, but she didn’t follow him back. Later, she wondered why he unfollowed her. While on the park bench, it all melts into a mush. He offers her a shoulder to cry on and some weed to smoke. If you think doing those two things one after the other is strange, the film defies that expectation!
It shows them driving away to smoke without any intervention, so she can take her mind off processing the loss. Still, Morgan tracks Clara’s location and forces her to join her. She scolds Clara for leaving her father’s funeral to smoke weed and for dating Miller, who is apparently a criminal’s son. Still, Clara keeps meeting Miller because of her teenage rebellion against her mother, and also because she likes Miller regardless.
Regretting You (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
How does the family secret affect Clara’s quest for rediscovery?
Also Read: 24 Best Indie Romantic Comedy Movies Of the Century
The first time Clara meets Miller (at least in the film), he is in a relationship with another girl. That’s why Jenny, who was cheating on her own husband at the time, tells her not to come between someone else’s. A while later, Miller breaks up with his then-girlfriend, paving the way for his relationship with Clara. She starts spending time with him, watching movies at the theater where he works. Their closeness doesn’t sit well with Morgan, who forbids Clara from leaving home. Still, she and Miller grow closer to the point that he joins her in bed the night of her 17th birthday. The next morning, Morgan finds them together and gets furious. Miller leaves immediately, and Clara is left dealing with her mother.
Around this time, Clara had walked into a room to find Jonah and Morgan kissing, which made her furious. She takes out her anger on Jonah at school and Morgan at home. In the end, Morgan tells Clara the truth: Jenny and Chris were having an affair, which she learned more about only after their deaths. That family secret changes Clara’s perspective about Jenny and Chris, which is precisely why Morgan refused to tell her before. Anyhow, after realizing those details, she gets a pleasant surprise from Miller, who makes a sentimental video about his and Clara’s relationship, thus proving his love for her and the film at the same time.
She gets into the drama course she had been meaning to get into and reconciles with Morgan along the way. The ending doesn’t reveal any profound understanding of their mended relationship or how their grief affected their fate. Instead, it uses embarrassingly sappy moments to reach a conventional happy ending.
Regretting You (2025) Movie Review:
Josh Boone’s rom-com is a coming-of-age film wrapped in mother-daughter bonding drama. While it’s about a teenager falling in love with a guy and realizing the messy arc toward adulthood, it is essentially about two women trying to be comfortable with and in each other’s company. One lives with constant regrets.
The other doesn’t want to lead her life with any. There’s a far better film that could be made with those emotional connections and genre beats. But “Regretting You” relies solely on the floaty charm of its central cast without delving deeper into any themes it presents. It plays out like every other mainstream romance film you’ll come across, taking no time to flesh out the emotional core of its story, thus being a hollow exercise in crafting an empathy-driven drama.
The same day I watched Boone’s film, I also watched Norman Jewison’s “Moonstruck,” a rom-com starring Cher and Nicolas Cage as two lovers moving past the loss of their partners while yearning for something deeper than a relationship driven by convenience or compatibility. There, the dialogues have a fascinating tempo, where even silences seem carefully calculated but organic. Every minor switch in its character arcs is unpredictable and idiosyncratic, but plausible. “Regretting You” is the exact opposite: it is predictable but completely implausible. Whether in the dialogue or in character choices, everything feels written by someone who has experienced love or grief solely through popular modes of media.
It stays so invested in its cutesiness, backed by a cloying amount of forgettable indie tracks, that it fails to capture the pains of grief and its effects on one’s psyche. Every moment of their interpersonal bonding leads with a surface-level grasp of its own themes. So, the entire Morgan-Jonah arc becomes painfully redundant with a succession of moments cheapened by an insistent sappiness. Even with its genre tropes, it could have been something as deep and delightful as Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird.” Instead, we get a dull film without a shred of personality that you can differentiate from the swarm of similar content.
