by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $9.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Zoe Kosovic, Lauren Graham, Bradley Whitford, Lainey Wilson
Intro:
… a series of flagrant and aggravating fumbles with extremely sensitive and dicey subject matter …
The tagline for this latest Colleen Hoover film adaptation is “Everybody deserves a second chance.” However, for Hoover herself, this is more like her third chance, as the last two attempts (the mawkish trauma porn slurry of It Ends With Us, and the irony-poisoned trash of Regretting You) neither generated great anticipation for more of the same material, nor justified getting more so soon after the last one. That Hoover herself is making her screenwriting debut here (co-writing with Lauren Levine) is akin to having a warning flare go off at point-blank range.
As we aggressively try and blink away, we are (begrudgingly) willing to admit that this is arguably the best Colleen Hoover film adaptation so far. Although the people involved in making it should hold back on feeling too self-congratulatory about that statement, because there are still a lot of problems here.
While it’s not as manipulative as It Ends With Us or desperately trying to find a midnight movie circuit audience like Regretting You, Reminders of Him still shows that same characteristically off-putting approach to portraying and discussing the effects of trauma as the previous film adaptations. The particular flavour in this instance is a combination of parental estrangement and grief, with Kenna (Maika Monroe) returning to her hometown after seven years in prison and finding the townsfolk (including her in-laws who are now caring for her daughter) apprehensive-at-best about seeing her again.
The film’s framing of this ostensible road to redemption is tied solely to Kenna’s attempts to reconnect with her daughter, but that ends up being a millstone around the neck of the entire plot. The circumstances surrounding the tragedy itself are dangerously close to Nicholas Sparks levels of misguidedly melodramatic, which considering it deals with driving under the influence (a real pissing-on-the-third-rail creative decision, as that’s an incredibly difficult thing to garner audience sympathy for) only serves to bring out raw discomfort without any of the catharsis.
It legitimately gets to the point where the film’s focus on Kenna’s grief and struggle (while Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham as the grieving in-laws barely factor beyond being humanoid hurdles between her and her daughter) comes across as suspicious, like an attempt to stack the deck in Kenna’s favour lest the audience start to think the worst of her actions and resulting attitudes. Rather than attempt in any way to be well-rounded or understanding of all the parties involved, the film mostly banks on engagement through the perceived injustice of it all from Kenna’s point-of-view and only rarely anyone else’s. It reads as Main Character Entitlement, which just adds another barrier to any goals of empathy, or even sympathy.
But even that doesn’t end up being the main issue, although it certainly doesn’t help. Despite the overbearing weight of the dramatic intentions in the narrative structure, the film doesn’t end up doing much with it. The spotlight shining on Kenna reveals itself to be quite dim, as even with her own strife taking precedence, the pain inherent to her situation is treated more as inconvenience than the stuff that would keep one up at night. The anguish of living with that horrific strata of a mistake, the time spent behind bars to just stew on that trauma, the despair of both finally being free and yet feeling more entrapped than ever; it is both dispiriting and rather irritating how much none of these potent, drama-worthy emotions actually poke through. If anything, they come across more like abstract thematic flavouring for the romance between Kenna and Ledger (Tyriq Withers), which not only further cheapens the attempted drama, but also highlights the utter lack of chemistry between these two, both as performers and as written characters.
Reminders of Him shows Colleen Hoover going 0-3 on film adaptations. Any second that Zoe Kosovic (a presence of weapons-grade adorable as the child at the centre of all this) is not on-screen amounts to little more than a series of flagrant and aggravating fumbles with extremely sensitive and dicey subject matter that, even by accident, should have turned out more impactful.
