Reminders of Him review – contrived Colleen Hoover romance has its charms

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Nearly two years on, it seems we’re still futilely chasing the high of summer 2024. Charli xcx’s hedonistic Brat-era mockumentary just flopped on the big screen. Espresso still plays at the grocery store but doesn’t hit the same. Kamala Harris is maybe considering a run for something. And the movie It Ends With Us, the glossy adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel that became a somewhat surprise late-summer blockbuster, refuses to die.

That film, directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Blake Lively, should have been a Hollywood success story: a deceptively sharp melodrama that proved that frankly sentimental, female-led, 90s-style studio fare could still draw audiences to cinemas, that schlocky BookTok material need not necessarily beget schlocky movies and that Lively could appeal to the Target demographic. Nevertheless, it cast a dark shadow. The legal mudslinging over Baldoni’s alleged sexual harassment on set has tainted primarily her reputation, and extinguished any box office glow. (Lively v Baldoni – her case, not his, as the latter was dismissed – will go to trial in May.) And then there’s the inevitable pipeline of follow-ups with near-guaranteed diminishing returns, the first of which, a dreadful grief / love quadrangle / YA mess called Regretting You, threatened to kill the buzz for CoHo adaptations entirely last October.

This is perhaps a disingenuous way to approach Reminders of Him, the latest CoHo adaptation to hit the big screen, but films such as these often invite disingenuousness, both on behalf of its makers and skeptical critics like myself. Which is a shame, because though it is hobbled by the expected contrivances, cliches and overwrought trauma, Reminders of Him, directed by Vanessa Caswill from a script by Hoover and Lauren Levine, has its charms, if met with lowered defenses and tempered expectations. Chief among them are two primarily horror actors attempting bruised, tender romance: Tyriq Withers, most recently of Jordan Peele’s ill-fated Him, as an ex-NFL player languishing in his hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, and Longlegs’s Maika Monroe as the woman who went to prison for killing his best friend Scotty (Rudy Pankow) in a car accident.

The former fairs better than the latter, in terms of alluring naturalism, but both manage to find enough within stock trauma to ground what should be a plot too offensively ludicrous to function. The result is something only mildly ludicrous, made more palatable by beautiful mountain vistas (Calgary ably standing in for eastern Wyoming) as well as an Americana soundtrack – Waxahatchee, Kacey Musgraves and the like – whose earthy, potent nostalgia casts a decent spell. It needs to, for the central conflict requires a laborious suspension of disbelief: Monroe’s Kenna, recently released from prison after serving five years for vehicular manslaughter, and Withers’s Ledger spark an immediate attraction at his bar, because somehow in this year 2026, an ex-NFL player does not know what his late best friend’s former girlfriend and “murderer” (his words) looks like.

The script, unevenly doctored at points to nod to audience questions – “what’s your trauma?” asks Amy (country singer Lainey Wilson), when giving a Kenna a job at a grocery store and injecting the film with much-needed candor – attempts to explain that Kenna looked much different in her mugshot, to no avail. (In flashbacks to her loved-up time with Scotty, Monroe has pink streaks in her hair.) But no matter: set aside the obvious issue, and there’s a magnetic pull to these two past-less yet still haunted lovers caught in a tangle of grief. Ledger, for some reason a barkeep, is the surrogate father to Scotty and Kenna’s five-year-old daughter (Zoe Kosovic) whom she has never met. Though she is desperate to, Scotty’s parents Patrick (Bradley Whitford) and Grace (Lauren Graham) – who, like Wilson, does the most with too little screentime – refuse contact, believing she fled the scene and left their son to die. Monroe and Withers, remarkably, manage to suggest the combustible internal struggle of such contrived allegiances, the way grief and attraction can mutate into something unstoppable.

A more ambitious or better movie may have tried to further expand Kenna’s world (a roommate with Down syndrome, played by Monika Myers, provides sweet comic relief) or the struggles of reintegration post prison, but Reminders of Him smartly keeps the focus tightly on the couple at hand, burning under the weight of twisted mutual understanding; though there are some contrivances that must be endured – namely Kenna’s letters to Scotty as trenchant voiceovers – there are just as many, like finally kissing in the rain, that pay off. Caswill’s direction can veer toward the too choppily edited or over-stylized – I could do without the reliance on music video-esque slo-mos to set the mood – but her adaptation resembles Baldoni’s in its lushness, that $25m studio budget actually befitting a big screen.

Reminders of Him does, in fact, remind of that earlier time, when It Ends With Us over-delivered on sweeping sentimentality, a brief glow before everything curdled. We cannot go back there, but I’ve heard far less pleasurable echoes.