Reminders of Him Won’t Be Hard to Forget

Perhaps one day there will be a Colleen Hoover adaptation that doesn’t feel like a social experiment on its audience, but not yet. Reminders of Him is the latest of the BookTok phenom’s novels to get adapted, and it’s the most bloodless, sexless, impactless yet. What are these movies when they’re not surrounded by behind-the-scenes controversy like It Ends With Us, or a prime example of gas-leak cinema like Regretting You? They’re Reminders of Him, a movie that’s adequately constructed, narrowly imagined, and immediately forgettable. Maybe it worked on the page. Onscreen, it’s vapor.

Hoover steps into the role of screenwriter to adapt her 2022 novel, working with co-writer and co-producer Lauren Levine and director Vanessa Caswill. Most of Hoover’s thematic obsessions are here: a woman from the wrong side of the tracks, a well-to-do man who aims to pull her into his social circle, an act of shocking violence that drives them apart, and questions about second chances and redemption. This time, the poor woman is Kenna (Maika Monroe), who seven years ago fell head over heels for the well-off Scotty (Rudy Pankow). They were young, dumb, and in love, and one night while driving home after splitting a single weed gummy, their car hit a pothole and flipped over. Scotty died, Kenna pled guilty to driving under the influence and served six years in prison, and now she’s out on good behavior and trying to rebuild her life back in Laramie, Wyoming. (None of these are spoilers, really; “reminders of him” is pretty clearly past tense.) 

Everything in town brings Scotty to mind, especially his best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), whom Kenna meets at the bookstore where she and Scotty used to hang out; after his NFL career ended, Ledger turned the place into a thriving bar. At first, they each judge the other, and Reminders of Him leans on flashbacks to show us previous misunderstandings. When Kenna and Scotty were dating, Ledger was a star athlete and didn’t take the relationship seriously. Kenna thought he was a bigshot, a guy leaving his best friend behind for fame and fortune. Now, though, the two bond over … well, it’s not really clear. Reminders of Him is nearly two hours long, but suffers from a real lack of genuine conversation between these two characters who we’re supposed to believe unable to stay away from each other. They talk a little about Scotty, and a little about what Kenna’s time in prison was like, but there’s no aha moment where it’s clear what these two see in each other, or even what Scotty and Kenna saw in each other. No conversations about their families, or about why Kenna felt class tension in her relationship with Scotty, or if she knew that his parents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) didn’t like her, or whether they went to college, or what jobs they wanted when they grew up. Instead, Reminders of Him layers in all the God’s-country tropes that we used to see in Nicholas Sparks movies: playing with sparklers under the stars; running through rainstorms to get to each other; long rides in pickup trucks, during which the two steal glances at each other. It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.

Maybe if Monroe and Withers had any chemistry, Reminders of Him would be more forgivable. But we’re living in a deeply unsexy time at the movies, one that’s overreliant on sex scenes presented with the same moves (the guy lifting the woman up, the fluid on-the-bed roll over) and compositions (closeups of fingers trailing on skin, a woman’s eyes looking down on her lover) and light on legitimate, tension-building foreplay and interpersonal kinetics. In Reminders of Him, Ledger offers Kenna a job and then shows her his half-built glass-and-stone mansion. Meanwhile, she does a good job organizing his bar’s office and mopping its floor. These are not actions of two people who can’t wait to rip their clothes off, which is what this movie needed to make its central pairing less soporific. Monroe is most interesting early in the movie, when she’s able to use the prickly defensiveness that’s served her so well as a scream queen. But by the time she and Withers have to play besotted, neither of them delivers the emotional vivacity required. They have all the sexual dynamism of milk-soaked bread.

That mutedness gets to a larger problem with Reminders of Him: the movie’s sense of fear. It’s like everyone involved was too spooked to make a movie that strayed from a very tight definition of romance or complicated viewers’ feelings about these characters. So everyone is good at heart, and everyone learns to understand each others’ points of view, and every bad thing is forgivable. Maybe that’s harmony, but it’s not dramatic. And without drama, there’s nothing to remember about Reminders of Him.