YNOT at the Movies

Sometimes a film wears its heart so openly on its sleeve that you wish, almost painfully, it had the script to match. That is the central tension of "Reminders of Him" (USA 2026 | 114 min.), adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel and directed by Vanessa Caswill, a film with every emotional ingredient in place but its storytelling is shakier than it first appears. The ambition is evident, and the cast commits gamely to the material. But good intentions and handsome cinematography of Alberta landscape, standing in for Wyoming, can only carry a film so far.

The premise is heartfelt: Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe), released after seven years in prison for an accident that killed her boyfriend Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow), returns to Laramie hoping to reunite with Diem (Zoe Kosovic), the daughter she has never been allowed to raise. Scotty's grieving parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), guard the girl like a fortress. Into this minefield walks Ledger (Tyriq Withers), Scotty's oldest friend and local bar owner, who finds himself drawn to the very woman the family blames for their son's death. It is a genuinely rich setup. The film, unfortunately, does not know what to do with it.

To the screenplay's credit, there is not a villain in sight. Every character here is drawn with a recognizable decency: Kenna carries her guilt without self-pity, Grace's cruelty comes entirely from grief, Ledger's conflict is rooted in loyalty, and even the most obstructive characters are acting from a place the audience can understand. That generosity of spirit is genuinely disarming, and it earns the film a measure of goodwill early on. The trouble is that sympathy and resonance are not the same thing. We understand these people, we do not begrudge them, but we cannot quite feel what they feel. Their grief stays at arm's length. Their longing does not pull at us. Their hope, when it finally surfaces, registers as a plot development rather than a release. The film secures our sympathy with ease, then mistakes that for emotional connection, never doing the harder work of making us truly inhabit the story alongside them.

The film charts this territory in a mostly linear fashion that is easy enough to follow, perhaps too easy. The storytelling rarely surprises, and scenes that should accumulate into something devastating too often tick by at a pace that feels not just unhurried but sluggish. A significantly tighter cut would have helped. What the script mistakes for restraint repeatedly reads as stalling, and the film's two-hour runtime begins to feel like a test of patience well before the third act arrives.

More damaging is how thoroughly the script undermines its own surprises. Kenna's maternal longing is so overwhelming and so constant that every plot turn becomes predictable long before it arrives. The emotional revelations the film builds toward, the moments meant to catch the audience off guard, land with a familiar thud. All its cards are on the table within the first half hour.

The relationship between Ledger and the Landry family compounds the problem. For a man established as Scotty's oldest childhood friend, Ledger is conspicuously absent from any depiction of Kenna and Scotty's life together. The film offers no explanation for this gap, no falling out, no distance, nothing. Then, without acknowledgment of the inconsistency, Ledger has assumed a near-paternal role in young Diem's upbringing. It is a thread the screenplay never bothers to untangle, and it quietly undermines the emotional logic the entire story depends on.

Maika Monroe works hard in the lead role and occasionally breaks through, giving Kenna a worn, interior quality that suggests a performer capable of more than the material demands of her. Tyriq Withers is likable and physically credible. But these are performances in service of a script that has not done the necessary work, and the gap between what the actors are reaching for and what the writing actually provides becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

This film tries very sincerely to break your heart, and there is something almost poignant about watching it fall short. It populates its world with people worth caring about, then fails to build the bridge that would make us care deeply. Sympathy without resonance is a lonely thing to sit with for two hours. The film reaches toward something real, stumbles over its own construction, and never quite recovers.

"Reminders of Him" opens in theaters on Friday, March 13, 2026.