A young mother attempts to connect with the five-year-old daughter she has never held, and falls in love along the way, in Reminders of Him, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This latest adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel following 2024’s It Ends with Us and last year’sRegretting You gets a huge boost from two charismatic lead performances and unexpectedly authentic handling from director Vanessa Caswill, but can’t quite escape one core issue: the underlying story here is artificially sentimental slop.
Still, it does a good enough job at obscuring what’s really going on that some audiences may be able to forgive it. A large part of that is down to star Maika Monroe, who so excels at playing deeply flawed characters that you may have been rooting for her antagonist in last year’s remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Here, she plays Kenna Rowan, who has just been released from prison and returns to her hometown of Laramie, Wyoming in search of gainful employment.
Here, she immediately sees the titular Reminders of Him in a roadside memorial to her deceased boyfriend Scotty (played in flashbacks by Rudy Pankow), which she promptly tears down. “Scotty never liked memorials,” she huffs, ignoring the fact that the memorial isn’t there for him, but still-grieving parents Patrick (Bradley Whitford) and Grace (Lauren Graham), and best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a former NFL player who operates the bar that Kenna finds herself in on her first night back.
But Kenna isn’t in Laramie for herself, or for Scotty: she’s there for Diem (Zoe Kosovic), the young daughter whom she has never met after giving birth in prison. Patrick and Grace have been raising Diem since then, and Ledger, who lives across the street, has been serving as something of a surrogate father. He intercepts Kenna before she can make it to her daughter, and Scotty’s parents start seeking legal protection when they learn she’s in town. But in actively keeping Kenna away from her daughter, Ledger discovers that she may not be that bad after all.
Now, uh, exactly what was it that Kenna did? You know, the major inciting event for Reminders of Him that hangs over every scene, that every character in the movie keeps referencing in almost every interaction. Well, you’ll have to forgive the movie for not telling you until the end, saving it as a juicy third act twist. That’s a wise decision that veers away from Hoover’s novel, adapted here by the author and Lauren Levine: this film becomes a lot less interesting, and a lot more frustrating, once we know what’s what.
But until then, we can take our guesses. Roadside memorial, seven-year prison sentence, “she killed our son.” Sounds like DUI manslaughter. So why is the movie being so coy with us? Because not only is the explanation completely implausible—it also robs both of its lead characters of the moral ambiguities that made them interesting in the first place.
But they are interesting until then, thanks to the lived-in performances from both Monroe and Withers, who are playing people from opposite ends of the spectrum that still feel like they come from the same world. And while this really should be a movie about a mother reconnecting with her long-lost daughter, we get wrapped up in the paperback romance thanks to two charismatic performances that share some genuine on-screen chemistry.
Director Caswill also approaches Reminders of Him with a dressed-down aesthetic that reflects contemporary American lives. Kenna’s journey from dollar store cashier to grocery store bagger may not be The Florida Project, or even last year’s Roofman, but there’s an authenticity here missing from most films of the genre. It’s the opposite approach of last year’s saccharine Regretting You—but that film was ultimately more successful because the overt sentimentality, which crashes into this film like a tidal wave by the finale, was a better fit for the material.
Despite the manipulative plotting and a climactic revelation that undercuts the moral complexity the movie spends most of its runtime building, Reminders of Him works better than it should thanks to the grounded direction and the lived-in chemistry between Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers. For long stretches it feels surprisingly naturalistic for a Hoover adaptation, even as the story quietly steers toward the kind of tear-jerking payoff the genre demands.
There’s a great movie somewhere in Reminders of Him, one that focuses on a genuinely flawed character and the legal hurdles involved in her attempts to reconnect with her daughter. But that movie is fighting with both a Lifetime-style family drama that wants to tie up everything in a neat bow by the end, and a Hallmark-style romance thrown in for good measure. Each of these elements succeeds to some degree here, and the unique combination might make this a win for genre fans, but in the end the competing impulses keep the film from becoming as honest as its best moments suggest it could be.
