Jolly Ranchers, AMC Theatres, Pepsi products, Stereolab, Lime LaCroix, Coconut LaCroix, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the 2025 film Novocaine, Union Square, New York Magazine — what do all these things have in common? They’re all given semi-prominent placement in the margins of Regretting You, Josh Boone’s adaptation of the Colleen Hoover book of the same name. Their inclusion makes the already bizarre film, in theaters now, even more delightful and strange. When did Mckenna Grace’s character Clara find time to see Carousel? How did they manage to navigate both AMC Theatres and Pepsi products when real AMC-heads know that AMC has freestyle machines that are specifically designed for Coca-Cola products? Are we actually supposed to believe that Allison Williams’s character, Morgan, is a New York Magazine subscriber? There are no satisfying answers to these questions, but thinking about them only enhances the rich text at hand.
Regretting You is the latest in a long line of vaguely insane — or “absolutely psychotic,” to quote our critic — romantic dramedies wherein characters fall in and out of love while tragedy unfolds around them. Mercifully, Regretting You doesn’t carry the emotional baggage of last year’s It Ends With Us, whose major players are still suing each other, or feature scenes of domestic abuse. The premise is straightforward, albeit wacky: Morgan (Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood) are a couple, and Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and Jonah (Dave Franco) are a couple. Morgan and Chris have a teen daughter named Clara who was conceived when they were teenagers and is a theater kid hoping to woo the coolest guy in school, Miller (Mason Thames). One day, Chris and Jenny are killed in a tragic car accident, leading Morgan and Jonah to realize they were having an affair. Laughter, tears, and product placement ensue.
What makes Regretting You so particularly pleasurable to watch is that the film is clear — through props and set decoration and product placement — that it exists in the real world. For instance, one of the driving subplots of the movie is hot teen boy Miller’s desire to be a filmmaker. Like any aspiring auteur, his bedroom is full of movie posters: Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown (and its lesser-seen sequel, The Two Jakes), Vertigo, and this past year’s Novocaine (all Paramount releases, of course). We come to learn that he works at the local AMC where he manages to sneak Clara into “the latest Tom Cruise movie” (another Paramount release) and when they later smooch in the theater, they do so in front of posters for The Running Man (a forthcoming Paramount release) and The Godfather (a past Paramount release doing some kind of retrospective run?). For a guy we’re told is the coolest boy in school, he seems to have a driving passion for Paramount films in lieu of classic “cool guy” stuff like playing football or having a sick truck (though he has the latter anyway).
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Watching the film often feels like an out-of-body and/or hallucinatory experience, but every time my eyes wandered away from whatever teary-eyed conversation the characters were having about love and loss, they latched on to some part of the production design. Clara’s room is full of Playbills, ranging from teen classics like Avenue Q to more sophisticated options like Carousel, and when she’s reading The Secret History — a dark novel about murder on a college campus — the text goes otherwise unremarked upon. There are several baffling visual motifs, like Jonah’s insistence on wearing the tightest possible shirt in which to teach high-school English or Miller’s ever-flexing jaw muscle. Every frame of the film is a rich text unto itself, asking more questions than it’s capable of answering. To that end: I personally felt like I was disassociating when I spotted an issue of New York in Morgan’s home that I happen to know features a print feature of mine — does this mean that I, too, am trapped somewhere in the universe of Regretting You?
