Regretting You - All That I Never Told You: Love and Loss in an Unlikely Rom-Com

We meet a young Morgan Grant in the late 2000s, spending her last year of high school with her sister Jenny, her boyfriend Chris, and Jonah, Jenny's partner. The four form an inseparable group preparing for graduation amidst parties and plans for the future. The problem is that Morgan and Jonah seem more in tune with each other than they are with their respective partners: Chris is outgoing and superficial, Jenny equally so, while Morgan and Jonah share a deeper, more reflective sensibility. But fate has other plans: Morgan discovers she's pregnant and marries Chris, giving up her university dreams to become a mother before she even turns twenty.

In Regretting You - All That I Never Told You, the story jumps seventeen years forward, with Morgan now nearing forty and grappling with her teenage daughter Clara. The relationship between the two is tense, with the girl perceiving her mother as overprotective and suffocating, while the latter struggles to let go of the child who forced her to sacrifice her youth. The situation escalates when Chris and Jenny die together in a car accident, and Morgan discovers with dismay a secret that united the two deceased, a secret that could change everything forever.

Regretting You: Between Remorse and Regret

Josh Boone surprised everyone with his second film The Fault in Our Stars (2014), an adaptation of John Green's novel that grossed over 300 million dollars worldwide and set new standards for dramatic teen romance. But he was then definitively burned by the failed comic book movie The New Mutants (2020), which was quietly released during the pandemic with disastrous results.

After a brief foray into the small screen with the screenplay and direction of some episodes of the series The Stand based on Stephen King, Boone once again confirms his literary inspiration and signs a new adaptation, this time from Colleen Hoover's novel of the same name, an editorial phenomenon thanks to BookTok and the success of the previous It Ends with Us.

The story starts from a premise that, on paper, hides considerable dramatic potential: how to come to terms with the loss of someone who betrayed us? A situation that doubles as the two people who lost their lives had betrayed their respective partners, who, coincidentally, harbored a mutual affection already in their teenage years. It matters little that there are relatives and children involved; the confusion is such that feelings spiral out of control in a romantic entanglement with no more rules.

The More, The Merrier

But this is only one of the elements underlying the narrative, and not even the main one. And yes, most of the runtime actually focuses on the teenage love story between Clara and her new suitor Miller, following all the typical coordinates of the young-adult genre up to the inevitable happy ending.

Regretting You - All That I Never Told You tackles this multitude of themes with a disarming superficiality at times, opting for melodramatic solutions so exaggerated as to border on unintentional kitsch. Heavy themes like suffering and grief are addressed with a sensitivity close to zero, as if mere glasses of wine were enough to forget the pain of loss, further amplified by the belatedly discovered betrayal. Too many sensations and emotions are staged with a "cheap" approach, devoid of the intensity capable of generating sincere empathy in an audience that watches the two hours of viewing with diminishing interest, since in addition to the lack of tact there is also a fundamental predictability that leaves little room for hypothetical surprises.