Author Colleen Hoover pulls a fast one on admirers of It Ends with Us (2024) and Regretting You (2025). Audiences had come to expect sophisticated romances that played to feminist mores. While there’s certainly romance involved, it’s more about ex-con Kenna (Maika Monroe) trying to re-connect with the daughter Diem (Zoe Kosovic) she lost after being imprisoned. The situation is complicated because she was jailed for killing her fiancé Scotty (Rudy Pankow) in a car accident while under the influence. You can picture the scene: “Hi, Diem, meet your mother…she killed your father.”
I liked this film instantly because within five scenes it had set out its dramatic stall. Kenna gets out of a taxi taking her to Laramie, Wyoming, to rip out of the ground a makeshift cross marking where Scotty died. She can’t get a job because she ticks the “previous conviction” box in a job application. She is sent to a discount store to try there but a flashback reveals the meet-cute with Scotty who was driving an orange-painted truck. Another man, Ledger (Tyriq Withers) owner of a local bar, takes Diem for school. In the bar she flirts with Ledger until noting his truck she realizes this is her dead fiance’s best friend, whom she’d never met, because during her short courtship with Scotty, Ledger was off trying to make his career in football.
Kenna’s realistic enough but driven by a sliver of romanticism that ends in a relationship with Diem. There’s nothing but obstacles in the way, Ledger for one, who has occasion to physically remove her from temptation, which curdles their growing relationship. The still-grieving grandparents Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford) fear Kenna might kidnap the girl and that eventually drives a wedge between them and Ledger, to whom they had grown incredibly close.
Everything about this is slow-burn. And there’s not an ounce of tear-jerking either. Kenna does not cry herself to sleep, doesn’t stand hidden under a tree or peek through a hedge or hover at a school gate trying to catch a glimpse of Diem. She doesn’t complain life’s unfair. Lacking a bed in her miserly accommodation, she sleeps on the couch, and is reduced to bagging groceries for a living.
There’s none of the usual misery memoir beats, nor does it take some miraculous piece of derring-do (saving Diem from drowning or a fire or from being knocked down in the street or – screenwriters have come up with worse – preventing her being kidnapped by someone else) to achieve a breakthrough. Nor is she baited in the street nor run out of town by people furious that she killed the well-liked Scotty.
Slow and contemplative would hardly be the best tone for a contemporary romance, and that takes a long time to get going thanks to the various complications. Resolution is provided with something of a get-out-of-jail-free car. As well as the DUI, Kenna was convicted for leaving the scene of the accident while (unknownst to her) her fiancé was still alive. The accident had occurred in a remote area and she had walked such a distance to get help and was herself in poor shape after the crash that she fell asleep in a barn only to discover Scotty had survived the accident only to die later.
In the old days you’d have called this a woman’s picture, but that category seems to have been taken over the excessively emotional Hamnet or Wuthering Heights, so it’s fairer to just class it as a more than decent picture for adults.
Both Maika Monroe (Longlegs, 2024) and Tariq Withers (Him, 2025) underplay to the benefit of the movie and there are interesting roles for Lauren Graham (Bad Santa, 2003), Bradley Whitford (The Handmaid’s Tale, 2018-2025) and Monika Myers in her debut. Directed with commendable restraint by Vanessa Caswill (Love at First Sight, 2023) from a screenplay by Hoover and producer Lauren Levine.
Like Regretting You, it’s not going to be a blockbuster, but quietly rewarding just the same.
The Magnificent 60s 