Directed By Vanessa Caswill

Starring – Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Bradley Whitford

The Plot – After prison, Kenna (Monroe), a reeling woman, attempts to reconnect with her young daughter but faces resistance from everyone except a bar owner (Withers) with ties to her child. As they grow closer, she must confront her past mistakes to build a hopeful future.

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, strong adult language, drug content, some violent content, and brief partial nudity

Reminders of Him | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

Though Colleen Hoover’s stories have always failed to live within the parameters of realism and even maturity, there are some endearing aspects to Reminders of Him that help it to make the big screen transition within its adaptation with flying colors, particularly the breathtaking cinematography from Tim Ives that takes full advantage of the uniqueness of its intended setting. Being that the entirety of this story is set in Laramie, Wyoming, long-winded establishing shots involving mountainous canvases and overhead framing allow for personal introspection that not only make each frame permeate with vibrantly intoxicating color that enriches the movie’s presentational pallet, but also coherently illustrates the internalized isolation that Kenna feels in such an unfavorable environment, where the shot compositions speak volumes to the alienating circumstance that quite literally surround the disparaging angst of her devastation, and considering Ives is a seasoned veteran when it comes to capturing the cinematic allure of the big screen, it gives the film a textural luminance that at least allowed me to indulge in the artistry periodically, when the narrative and storytelling continuously alienated me, making this easily the most stylistically entrancing installment to Hoover’s adaptive library. In addition to Ives work behind the lens, it’s the magnetic charisma of Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers in front of it that truly bring these characters to life with the kind of lived-in depth that is most noticeably missing from their developed characterization, with the personalities bouncing so smoothly seamless off of one another. While their romantic chemistry leaves plenty more to be desired in sensually sexy sequences that stoke the coals of their entanglement, separately, they each attain a firm grip over the integrity of the proceedings, in ways that appraise curiosity to the air of their respective characters, with Monroe conjuring deep-seeded remorse and antagonizing regret for that one fateful night in question, while Withers’ sensitivity and leading man charms continuously feels like the gauging meter of morality from the audience, with him taking on much more of the movie’s most emotionally wrenching scenes than I expected from the actor mostly left on mute during last summer’s HIM, proving tremendous adaptability for an actor who could easily be typecast with his one-of-a-kind look that feels sculpted for sports movies, and instead tapping into something cerebral that brings out the empathetic warmth and stoic backbone for the movie. Lastly, I think at least one half of the movie’s plot certainly does its job attaining some semblance of emotional impact in finding a readable connection to the audience, particularly the side of matters pertaining to Kenna attempting to reconnect with her daughter, which leads to a third act climax full of betrayal and confrontation between characters that is easily the highlight of the movie, in terms of compelling curiosity and dramatic underlining from a script that never finds comfortable consistency within itself. As expected, the conflict plays out exactly the way that I initially predicted, without anything even incremental in creative deviation, but there’s something candidly tender and effortlessly earnest about a mother’s reunion that will always play into the hearts of the sappily saccharine within the audience, and while it never attained any semblance of tears or surmising goosebumps in my own personal interpretation, it does present a poetically profound exclamation point about self and outsider forgiveness that forces the characters to swallow some unavoidable truths about themselves, in turn depleting the overwhelming power of grief that often obscures what is so evidently in front of us.

NEGATIVES

This third film in the Colleen Hoover adaptive saga is much better than last year’s Regretting You, but it doesn’t even come close to reaching the intentional or unintentional entertainment value of 2024’s It Ends With Us, as a result of some clumsy creative decisions that proves the transition from novel to screen isn’t fully realized with seamlessness, beginning with the aforementioned lack of morality that condemns this established romance from the word go. Aside from the fact that Monroe and Withers couldn’t ignite a spark of intense passion between them, the structural outline of this story surrounding a woman who hooks up with her deceased fiancé’s best friend is one that unintentionally crafts an unrelenting ickiness to everything that transpires from it, without anything from the script even coming close to internalized confrontation from either of the characters being forced to grapple with unforeseen feelings that come at the expense of their respective memories with the deceased, especially those involving Kenna’s journal to her deceased fiancé, which is the movie’s clumsily enacted exposition dump that feels like a direct conversation to the audience, instead of one aimed at a man she once loved. Such an example are these unnatural sentences that try to cram as much information about their initial meeting and fateful night that the deceased already should know about, but bares repeating in order to keep the audience at eye level with what transpired. While the movie does attempt various flashbacks leading up to the horrifying accident, without anything in the production even coming close to de-aging Maika Monroe towards even feeling days younger than how Kenna appears in the current day arc, it’s a gimmick that is abandoned at the midway point of the movie, only to be picked back up when the third act finally reveals what happened, and considering this pause completely sucks out what little curiosity factor that I had from the speculation of a defined tragedy from the characters that forced them to omit Kenna from her daughter’s life, it makes me wish that the movie would’ve just enacted a linear travel of passage with the storytelling, as a way of living within and growing with these characters, allowing it the frequent tedium of halting the movie’s momentum for tell-not-show, instead of building towards a mystery the likes of which isn’t remotely surprising or compromising to Kenna’s character. On top of this, the script co-written by Hoover continues with it all of the therapy-speak and emotional immaturity of adolescents, with these horrendously written lines of dialogue that elicited a symphony of groans to my withering investment to the film. While there are no shortage of examples to put together a top ten list of hilariously awful responses from these characters, some of my favorites pertain to lines like “What’s your trauma?”, “Music is nothing but sad”, and especially “Grudges are heavy, but for people hurting the most, I suppose forgiveness is heavier”, make this feel like meandered fan fiction written by a 13-year-old girl, and one who is listening to far too much Emo music to mend her heartbreak, making these vital interactions transcribe with the kind of distracting artificiality that can’t be taken seriously, despite the movie’s sternly serious demeanor. Speaking of emo music, it’s rare that a soundtrack will find its way to the negatives of my spirited dissection, but the collection of pop selections featuring a tragic underlining to their lyrical impulses are not only abrasively unsubtle on a scene’s intention, in ways that feel like a wet blanket of monotony meant to eat away at your sanity, but also neurotically performed by covering artists who can’t hold a candle to their original versions, enacting a cheaply compromised enveloping to scenes defined by tenderness and vulnerability, without any kind of palpably brief emotionality to contextualize their various sentiments. Finally, my initial praise of the movie’s presentation does come with a bit of caveat, in terms of the surrounding elements to the cinematography of lighting and framing, which unload such a dreadfully dull presentation to the movie’s canvas that, at times, makes this feel like a bigger budgeted Lifetime Television movie. Creativity is sought after in the visual dissection of dual timelines in the narrative, with artificially light and airy colors of past days of Kenna’s blossoming love giving way to dreadfully drab schemes meant to convey insight into her depressed state of mind, balanced by such conventional framing between characters that lack any kind of emotional intuition to what each of them are feeling, and considering Vanessa Caswell’s only previous feature length direction came from Love at First Sight, a forgettable Netflix movie-of-the-week offering, it’s easy to see why she settles for artistry that is so evidently beneath her, making me all the more appreciative of spectacular establishing shots of Wyoming’s mountainsides in the cinematography, that temporarily cured my eyes of the surrounding ugliness that absorbed every ounce of character and personality from this presentation.

OVERALL
Reminders of Him is every bit the predictably lifeless and emotionally unsubtle entertainment vaccum hinted at during some of the year’s most revealing trailers, and made worse by an overlong runtime of nearly two hours that is incapable of crafting emotional depth to a coldly damp love story that is morally irreprehensible, to the least of its problems. While earnestness is attained in the charmingly disarming performances from Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers, the lack of chemistry between their passionate foundation extinguishes any semblance of intensity or tension to this shape sorter of a story, producing a surmising sentiment to Colleen Hoover’s work that feels too juvenile to be enacted for adult eyes

My Grade: 4.7 or D