Regretting You

Morgan Grant has spent two decades being the responsible one. She married young, raised her daughter Clara with careful, anxious devotion, and settled into a marriage to Chris that feels more like routine than passion. Her sister Jenny is the freer, more impulsive counterweight, the one who says the things Morgan won't. Then Chris dies in a car crash, and the bottom drops out.

What surfaces in the aftermath is a betrayal Chris kept from them, something that reframes not just who he was but who Morgan and Clara have been to each other. Adapted from Colleen Hoover's 2019 novel, the film pairs grief with the messy work of rebuilding trust. Allison Williams plays Morgan, Mckenna Grace is Clara, Dave Franco steps in as Jonah Sullivan, and Scott Eastwood appears as Chris. Josh Boone, who directed The Fault in Our Stars, keeps the tone grounded in everyday details rather than grand gestures.

The film arrived in theaters on October 22, 2025, backed by a $30 million budget. It went on to earn $90.4 million worldwide, a return that suggests the Hoover fan base showed up even without a massive marketing push. Critics and audiences split, but the audience side was warm enough to make the movie a talking point. What separates Regretting You from standard grief dramas is its refusal to pick a villain. The betrayal at the center is real, but so is the love that surrounded it, and the movie lives in that uncomfortable space. [edit]

Morgan Grant built her adult life around a single organizing principle: being the responsible one. She married young, raised her daughter Clara with a kind of careful, anxious devotion, and settled into a marriage to Chris Grant that has the texture of routine more than passion. Morgan's sister Jenny is the freer, more impulsive counterweight in her life, the one who says the things Morgan won't and who has never quite fit the family's unspoken rules about propriety.

Clara is seventeen and made of the opposite material. She's sharp-tongued, impatient with her mother's hovering, and starting to test the edges of her own independence. Underage drinking, a little smoking, the usual small rebellions that feel enormous from the inside. She's also falling into something that feels like real love with Miller Adams, a boy whose family carries its own weight. His grandfather Hank is the kind of gruff, steady patriarch who fills a room, and Miller's world is more working-class and less supervised than Clara's. Their romance is the film's engine of warmth, the part that reminds you what it felt like to be seventeen and certain about something.

Then Chris dies suddenly, in a car crash, and the bottom drops out. What follows in the immediate aftermath is the ordinary brutality of grief: the casseroles, the well-meaning neighbors, the way a house feels wrong at certain hours of the day. Morgan and Clara, already straining against each other, find that loss doesn't bring them together so much as it exposes the fault lines that were always there. Clara retreats into Miller and into anger. Morgan retreats into control, which is the only language she has.

And then a betrayal surfaces. Something Chris kept from them, something that reframes not just who he was but who Morgan and Clara have been to each other. The film's tagline, "Some secrets survive the people who keep them," is the whole thesis: the dead don't take their secrets with them. They leave them in the living room for everyone else to trip over. The discovery forces Morgan to confront the possibility that her marriage was not what she believed, and forces Clara to confront the possibility that her mother is not the villain of her adolescence but a woman who was also, quietly, being lied to.

The middle act is the messy work of the title: regret, and what you do with it. Morgan begins to entertain the idea of a life she didn't choose, a reconnection with Jonah Sullivan, a figure from her past whose presence in the story is complicated by exactly how much he knew and when. Clara, meanwhile, has to decide whether the love she's found with Miller can survive the fact that her family is coming apart, and whether she can look at her mother as a person rather than an obstacle.

What distinguishes the film from a standard grief drama is its refusal to assign a villain. Chris's betrayal is real, but so is the love that surrounded it. Morgan's controlling nature is real, but so is the fear underneath it. Clara's cruelty is real, but so is her grief. Boone keeps the camera close and lets scenes breathe, and the North Carolina setting, humid and green and ordinary, gives the whole thing a lived-in texture rather than a glossy one. The film is, at bottom, about learning to see your parents as people and your children as strangers who might surprise you.[edit]