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Ah, double date night. Drive into downtown. Get a little Din Tai Fung. Go to the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation. Your girlfriend chirping in your ear the whole time about how absolutely terrible the movie is.
Reminders of Him is not the disastrously awful mess that 2025’s Regretting You was, but that may be for the better. At least that one dove right into so-bad-it’s-good territory without even blinking. This latest, about a woman who is released from prison for vehicular homicide and attempts to connect with the young daughter she’s never met (while f**king and falling in love with her dead boyfriend’s best friend), is simply mediocre, a cheesy-syrupy romantic drama without much there-there.
Amazingly, I liked Reminders of Him more than my girlfriend, who is a sucker for sappy shit. She hated it, but where we agree is that the audience’s reactions to this overly sentimental tale made the experience slightly more palatable. The best friend takes care of the little girl. Awwww! There’s a kitten. Double-awwww! The best friend is flashing eyes at the main character. Ooooh!
This is baseline romantic drama, my friends, real gutter novel level stuff. Director Vanessa Caswill knows what she’s working with, at least. While Caswill doesn’t deserve plaudits for this piece of work, Reminders of Him largely does what it sets out to do: throw two good-looking young people at each other, let manipulative sparks fly, and allow the audience who pays for this stuff lap it up.
On that note, the male half of the other couple that went out with us tonight declared, “Thank God I didn’t pay for that,” while his girlfriend, who is absolutely a sucker for sappy shit, quite enjoyed it (that was much less surprising than my girlfriend hating it).
Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers hold their own and largely are able to sell their characters in ways that none of the cast of Regretting You could–a more coherent script by Lauren Levine helps. The drama may be forced, and is certainly manipulative, but they have good chemistry and play off each other well enough. While Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham aren’t given a whole lot to do, young Zoe Kosovic is super cute (awwww!) and business partner Roman (Nicholas Duvernay) is a charming source of comic relief. Monica Myers is funny in a small role, though it’s a shame she’s dropped from the plot once that sappiness ratchets up to 11.
What hurts Reminders of Him more than anything else is that there just isn’t much to the story, at least how it’s laid out. While the dialogue is tolerable, the movie takes a really long time “getting to the good stuff” (if you can call it that), and when it does, it doesn’t amount to much. The conflict, which the movie flirts with and skirts around for an hour and a half, gets brushed away so quickly at the end you’re left wondering what was the point in the first place.
For fans of mushy romantic dramas based on Colleen Hoover novels, Reminders of Him does just enough to work. That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie, or even a good romantic drama. But it’s not Regretting You terrible (for better or for worse), even if my girlfriend disagrees with me on that count.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.
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