‘There’s a Before You, there’s a During You…but I never thought there’d be an After You’
Reminders of Him marks popular ‘Book-Tok’ writer Colleen Hoover’s third film adaptation in as many years. 2024’s It Ends With Us was, ironically, only the beginning, with last year’s critically panned Regretting You making up the middle of the pack and this addition to the lineup now arriving just in time to tie in rather fittingly with Mother’s Day.
It’s billed as a romance between its two young, striking stars – Maika Monroe’s Kenna and Tyriq Withers’ Ledger – and that relationship certainly looms large, at least in terms of pure runtime mileage, but at its core, it’s a much more introspective dive into Kenna’s longing to finally connect with her young daughter, Diem, who was taken away from her at birth.
We meet a rather closed-off Kenna as she returns to the familiar town of Laramie after serving seven years’ hard time for the manslaughter of Scotty, her boyfriend, and father to Diem. This is a town rife with all sorts of memories – first meeting Scotty and falling in love – and Kenna, narrating to us, says early on ‘I’m headed back to the place it all went wrong to see if I can get something right’. Self-reflection comes via that most popular of young adult fiction tropes, letters written to someone yet never intended to be sent. Kenna keeps her diary as if sharing it with Scotty, wherever he may be, serving as the narrator of her own story.
In coming back to town in search of a job, she happens across Ledger, the hunky owner of a local bar who gives her a chance, not least because he immediately seems to have the hots for her. As is the case with any small town, though, he’s soon revealed to not only be Scotty’s old best friend (and smoking buddy) but serving as something of a surrogate ‘fun uncle’ figure to a now seven-year-old Diem, who lives with her grandparents across the road. It’s an incredibly contrived and convenient story (neither one of them recognise the other, not even from photos) but I’m able to overlook such narrative quirks in a romantic context – you have to get two people in a room together somehow.
What’s more damning, however, is the lack of chemistry on display here between the two central leads. I’ve seen some critics really find something worthwhile in the bond between Kenna and Ledger, but try as I might, I really struggled to find anything worth following along here, especially given the film’s relatively big ask of a full two hours.
You can do a lot with a romance in that time (off of the top of my head, I’m thinking La La Land) so its runtime shouldn’t necessarily be an issue, but the story at hand here could have been told in ninety minutes and would have come out all the better from such a trimming. It would be very easy to go into a film like this as a male critic and be dismissive of it as a romance – I’m not the target audience here – but I do believe I go into every film I see from a place of wanting to champion it and wanting to find the best of it.
That was a tricky ask with this one; in fact, there are long stretches that are rather dull, or at the very least seem wholly disconnected from what I did find compelling.
Like them or loathe them, Hoover’s books have found a ravenous audience and I can perhaps see the appeal of Reminders of Him on the page. A story that manages to deftly tie Kenna’s different yearnings – the steamy companionship and comfort of Ledger and the gut-wrenching desire to be allowed time with her daughter – together, threading that needle with a dual focus and time given to flesh out both ideas, sounds like a genuinely moving prospect (putting the strangeness of finding a place in the arms of your dead lover’s best friend aside).
As I mentioned, the way to make that work on-screen would be to run with it and use ninety minutes wisely to ensure a good balance; what’s been done here is a positively glacial approach that would have needed a six-part miniseries at least to have the kind of depth needed to really sing.
The film’s moments with Diem are the best of the bunch (especially the ending, which strives to tie things together nicely and does lean into emotional territory) but they feel horrendously overshadowed by the clunky romance at play here. Rather than complement each other, the two threads feel as though they’re competing for space in the narrative, and yet the film still manages to feel incredibly plodding as well.
For a film called Reminders of Him, I also really needed to get a better sense of who Scotty was in life to appreciate his absence in death, because the only thing I could really tell you about him from what’s on offer here is that the man liked his herbs and the music of Coldplay. He might’ve had Green Eyes…?
Ultimately, Reminders of Him felt like a frustratingly tepid and unmemorable Mother’s Day trip to the cinema. I really wanted to find more to like about it than I did – I do love a good romance and it’s always nice to be able to hold up a movie like this one when so many of them get kicked through the streets just for the crime of being made with a female audience in mind (I like to think of that as the Twilight effect) – but outside of its final scenes, this felt incredibly tricky to engage with.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate violence, drug misuse, sex, upsetting scenes, strong language.
Reminders of Him is in cinemas now.
