Regretting You

Commitment and fulfillment aren’t necessarily hand-in-hand in Regretting You, an eye-rolling saga of hookups and breakups that never rings true.

This adaptation of a novel by Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us) from director Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars) is a contrived romantic melodrama about intergenerational strife, family secrets, parental responsibility, and living with what-ifs.

It chronicles a handful of characters whose lives are thrown into turmoil, most notably Morgan (Allison Williams), her teenage daughter, Clara (McKenna Grace), and her husband, Chris (Scott Eastwood).

Morgan has been with Chris since high school, while her best friend from those teenage years, Jonah (Dave Franco), has married Morgan’s sister (Willa Fitzgerald). Morgan and Jonah are still close because of the family connection, but there’s a tension.

Meanwhile, Clara is becoming more rebellious against her somewhat overbearing mother. She finds companionship with Miller (Mason Thames), an aspiring filmmaker and popular classmate, and tries to carve her own future.

Then a sudden tragedy reveals secrets that Morgan tries to conceal from Clara for her own well-being, but that decision winds up adding to the youngster’s resentment.

Burdened by grief, guilt, and other emotional scars, they gradually drift apart while dealing with their respective tailspins. Can they find common ground amid the dysfunction? “Smiling feels wrong right now,” Clara confesses to Miller.

As they search for answers and future is uncertain, Morgan in particular wonders if decisions made years ago might have caused their lives to turn out differently.

Along the way, the characters feel like they come from the head of a screenwriter (or novelist, in this case) rather than the real world. The central mother-daughter dynamic simply isn’t convincing, the performances are stiff, and there’s little incentive for the intended emotional investment.

Straining to be taken seriously, the syrupy screenplay by Susan McMartin (Mr. Church) is too artificial to offer much meaningful insight into contemporary relationships. It struggles to fit all the narrative pieces together.

The cinematic equivalent of a beach read, Regretting You might be cathartic for its characters but probably won’t resonate as strongly for moviegoers. As for the feelings of regret, that’s a different story.

Rated PG-13, 116 minutes.