Hollywood keeps trying to make Colleen Hoover happen, and sadly it seems to be working. It Ends With Us was a surprise sleeper hit that went onto be the subject of a million ongoing lawsuits between the cast and crew of that film. And last year’s Regretting You did very good business as well. I didn’t particularly like either of these films, but I have to give credit where it’s due. It’s almost impossible to launch a financially successful mid-budget drama for adults that isn’t released direct to a streaming service, in the year 2026. And yet, audiences seem to be engaged with Hoover’s work in the same way they were with the million Nicholas Sparks adaptations we got in the 2000s-early 2010s. And after seeing Reminders of Him, I’ve yet to really understand Colleen Hoover’s whole thing.

Kenna (Maika Monroe) just got out of prison. Several years ago, she was driving in a car wreck that killed her boyfriend (Rudy Pankow), and she gave birth to his child while she was in prison. When she’s released, she returns to the Wyoming town where this all happened, hoping to rebuild her life. Scotty’s parents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) have custody of her now 5-year-old daughter, and her parental rights have been severed. With the help of Scotty’s best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), Kenna hopes to find redemption and meet her daughter for the first time. 

I keep giving Colleen Hoover adaptations chances, and they keep not being for me. And at this point I’ve concluded maybe the problem is me, maybe I’m just dead inside. Because I saw Reminders of Him in a very crowded theater full of mostly women who were totally into every minute of this, people who probably loved the book. I tried to read the book, I only got maybe a third of the way through it before I gave up. I didn’t like Hoover’s thinly written characters or the overly melodramatic nature of this story, and the effort of slogging through this depressing book until the heroine finally finds redemption, didn’t really seem like a good time to me. But I did want to see the movie adaptation and the reason for that is Maika Monroe.

And Maika Monroe is giving this glorified Hallmark movie much more than it deserves. You look in her eyes and you see a woman who’s been through some truly dark times. You believe her trauma, you believe what she’s telling you even if the movie gives you no other reason to buy anything else that’s going on. She’s giving this character a far richer internal life than is probably on the page. She comes as close as this movie gets to something emotionally real, and I’ll give credit where it’s due for that. Monroe has been a reliably compelling actress since I first saw her in It Follows, probably over a decade ago. She’s the strongest thing this movie has, so it’s probably good she’s in basically every scene. 

Tyriq Withers failed to impress me in the recent sports-themed horror film Him, and I will say he’s better as a romantic lead. But also, there’s almost nothing to this character. He’s the guy who gave up a promising sports career to take care of his deceased friend’s daughter. He’s the martyr. He’s the only one who sees that Kenna is maybe not the terrible person everyone made her out to be. There’s a character archetype, right next to the manic pixie dream girl, known as the flawless rescue stud, and that’s what this character is. That would be fine if that were a jumping off point to character detail that was more detailed and nuanced, but there’s not a lot going on with Ledger. Withers keeps trying desperately to wring more out of this character, but there’s only so much he can do. His chemistry with Monroe is fine, but I never found myself actively rooting for these two.

In the supporting cast, we have Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford as Scotty’s parents who are, understandably, furious with Kenna and want nothing to do with her. But these two are painted as straightforward villains for the majority of this story, and it kind of feels forced when they have to see the light in the third act. We don’t spend much time with them, so we don’t have a strong grasp of what they are emotionally, beyond just grieving parents. Also, I’ll say Lauren Graham did a much better job playing a mother grieving her son’s death in the movie Twinless last year, but that was a film not enough people saw. It’s now streaming on Hulu. I’m not saying you should go watch Twinless instead of watching Reminders of Him, but I’m also not not saying that.

Vanessa Caswill directed this, she’s mostly known for directing British television. If this film feels like, I don’t know, a made for television movie of the week, the fault is not with her. It’s with Colleen Hoover, who co-wrote the script with Lauren Levine. From what I could tell, after reading some of the book, it looks like this script is following the source material pretty well, so fans of the book should get everything they wanted from this adaptation. But even condensed into a not-even-two hour runtime, there are long sections that drag and meander, and then once we get to what’s supposed to be the big, climactic emotional catharsis, it somehow feels rushed, even though it took forever for us to get here. I don’t have enough to say about the technical aspects to warrant their own paragraph, but I will say cinematographer Tim Ives does a very nice job at making this middle of nowhere Wyoming town look cozy and inviting. And considering Wyoming is a place I’d never want to go, I’d say that’s a significant accomplishment.

Reminders of Him is the closest a Colleen Hoover adaptation has gotten to something emotionally real, but we still never quite get there. The film is dealing with some emotionally difficult subject matter – grief, guilt, regret, abandonment, etc., but it never dives too deeply into any of those, and as a result we have a final product that feels emotionally fragmented. Ultimately, this is a movie that desperately wants you to *feel* something. And the audience I was in was totally buying what it was selling. I heard a bunch of sniffles around me throughout the last 20 minutes and all I could think about during that time was whether or not I’d beat the traffic going home. Again, this is probably just a me problem, I’m probably just dead inside, but I never really felt anything.