Maika Monroe – The Magnificent 60s

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.

Luckily I had been fortified in my weekly cinema outing by the wonderful Living (2022) before entering dudsville for this double bill. Both Deus and Watcher have all the hallmarks of direct-to-DVD productions which have, to use the old parlance, “escaped” into cinema distribution.

I’m probably a bit rusty about the cost of making the kind of giant spacecraft shown in Deus, billions of dollars surely, so am assuming that big projects like this will encounter budget overruns which would account for the rationing of electricity on board, resulting in the murky lighting. And there’s not an alien in sight unless you count the robotic crew who speak in strangely monotonous tones.

Like most sci-fi films this involves a crew on a mysterious mission awaking from hibernation to investigate a distant object, in this case a sphere. The title assumes this might be about someone playing God and so it transpires, taking a leaf out of The Avengers: Infinity War (21018) playbook with a plot to wipe out three-quarters of the Earth’s population in some kind of eco good deed.

Not only has an evil genius Vance (Phil Davis), who appears only as a hologram (natch), gone to all this bother and created a heavenly apparition but in order to achieve his ends he has had to go to all the clever bother of killing off the family of Karla (Claudia Black) in a car crash so that he can have the opportunity to insert a chip in her brain to infiltrate her imagination.

Former hitman Ulph (David O’Hara) forms part of the crew and the only measure of excitement comes when, mercifully, parts of the mother ship explode. Any action or suspense is purely theoretical with writer-director Steve Stone (In Extremis, 2017) responsible for this monstrosity.

It’s a terrible thing to say I know but I was praying for the serial killer to get a move on and wipe out dull lifeless heroine Julia (Maika Monroe) in Watcher. A former actress, now unemployed, who has moved to Bucharest with advertising executive partner Francis (Karl Glusman) she spends all her time moping around crying wolf. Naturally, everyone ignores her if only for the fact that when she claims to be watched by a man from across the street she has facilitated such voyeurism by leaving her curtains wide open.

The serial killer is known as The Spider for obvious reasons – I guess he has either a hairy back, six arms, climbs up the outside of buildings, or is the type of arachnid who bites the head off his victims or all of the above or because newspaper headline writers had run out of murderer nicknames or were simply devoid of imagination.

As with Matt Damon in Stillwater (2021) her sense of isolation, what with hubby working all hours, is increased because only a tiny minority of the population have the courtesy to speak English. Location-wise you know where this is going to end up because next door neighbor Irina (Madalina Anea) keeps a gun in a drawer in case her ex gets antsy, making him of course the first red herring.

For a time it looked as if this was going to turn into something a lot more interesting, a twist on a twist, for in fact she is as much a watcher as the man (Burn Gorman) – a cleaner in a strip club who stares out of the window in a break from the relentless task of caring for his aged father – accused of this crime. In a very foolish gesture she appears to be encouraging him.

You begin to hope that, to redeem this picture, the upshot is going to be that a paranoid woman shoots an innocent man. Instead, the climax is straight of Hancock’s Half Hour, a legendary British television comedy series, where the heroine survives after losing more than a good armful of blood, probably enough to fill all arms, legs and the bulk of her body.

Maika Monroe (It Follows, 2014) has gone with the erroneous assumption that the less acting she does the more she will appear withdrawn. I felt sorry for Karl Glusman (Greyhound, 2020) in his first leading man role, given nothing to do. Oddly enough, Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim, 2013) has the best scene, demanding an apology from his accuser.

I’m not quite sure what debut director Chloe Okuna did to the original screenplay of the more experienced Zack Ford (Girls’ Night Out, 2019) to grab the main writing credit but it was far from enough.

Like The Banshees of Inisherin, too much appears to be expected of both writer-directors who might have benefitted from a stronger producer challenging their concepts and helping shape the finished material.

Tag: Maika Monroe

Reminders of Him (2026) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Deus (2022) / Watcher (2022) – Seen at the Cinema