As with Josh Boone’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel Regretting You, Vanessa Caswill’s Reminders of Him feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact. Not only is it scarcely concerned with its characters behaving like flesh-and-blood human beings, this latest adaptation of one of Hoover’s novels relies so heavily on absurd coincidences that it becomes difficult to discern what it’s even trying to say about grief and forgiveness.
Following Kenna (Maika Monroe) after she’s released from prison, where she served six years for vehicular manslaughter in an accident that killed her fiancé, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), the film doesn’t so much tug at the heart strings as ceaselessly yank on them. And while Monroe is relatively convincing as a woman desperate to meet her now five-year-old daughter, Diem (Zoe Kosovic), whom she never even got to hold, her redemptive arc lacks any shades of nuance.
Reminders of Him’s most baffling narrative decision involves Kenna unwittingly running into Scotty’s best friend, Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a bartender who’s helping to raise Diem, and neither of them knowing what the other looks like. This is meant to be explained by Ledger having been out of town—namely playing in the N.F.L.—during Scotty and Kenna’s courtship, but for as close as Scotty was to both of them, the likelihood that Scotty didn’t so much as share a photo of his girlfriend with his best bud stretches credulity to the breaking point.
Incomprehensibility would seem to be the guiding principle of this film, which is also damaged by impossibly flat characterizations. From Ledger the stoic good guy to Scotty’s bitter, resentful parents, Patrick (Bradley Whitford) and Grace (Lauren Graham), who fight to keep Kenna away from Diem, everyone in Reminders of Him is predestined to forgive our protagonist.
Had Kenna been forced to grapple with her mistakes and regrets, or had Patrick and Grace’s journey toward, well, grace evinced some measure of complexity, the story may have been illuminating, rather than dully earnest. But Reminders of Him is so intent on making it crystal clear that Kenna is worthy of a second chance that it leaves its audience to spend most of its nearly two-hour runtime waiting for everyone in the film to come to that same realization.
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