Regretting You

“Regretting You” opens on teenaged Morgan (Allison Williams), her boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and her boyfriend Jonah (Dave Franco), a tight-knit group of friends in the late 2000s, preparing to graduate high school, hanging out, going to parties, and listening to The Killers when driving around their small town. Personality-wise, they seemed like mismatched couples, with Morgan and Jonah closer in spirit than their extrovert partners Chris and Jenny. Unfortunately, since Jonah kept his crush on Morgan a secret, she doesn’t realize his true feelings for her when she tells him she’s pregnant with Chris’ baby. Fast forward 17 years later, that baby, Clara (Mckenna Grace) is now preparing for her own college ambitions and nursing a crush on a classmate, Miller (Mason Thames), who may or may not still have a girlfriend. Morgan and Chris aged from high school sweethearts to middle aged parents and after all these years, Jonah and Jenny finally got back together and have a son. However, the picture-perfect family comes undone after a car accident reveals Chris and Jenny’s secret affairl. Morgan and Jonah are left to deal with the truth and must figure out how best to move forward for their own sake, but also Clara’s, who looked up to them both.

There’s a good movie in here somewhere, about a mother and daughter trying to find their way through grief and betrayal to some sort of happiness. We even glimpse it, now and again. Williams is a capable, compelling lead, and there’s a natural, lived-in feel to her early scenes with Grace’s Clara. But once tragedy strikes, any tender mother-daughter moments are few and far between, Susan McMartin’s script instead electing to keep Clara in rebellious brat mode for much of the movie’s runtime. It gets old fast. As for Morgan and Jonah, the sparks that Williams and Franco sporadically generate never blossom into the type of sustained heat you’d expect from characters who have been secretly pining for one another for so long.