Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 13, 2026
I am not really the target audience for Reminders of Him, the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation (It Ends with Us, Regretting You). The prime demo is closer to my eighth-grade girls, who not only insisted I review the film but also demanded they come along. It may also be one of the few times they came down harder on a film than I did.
Their view: First off, JJ from Outer Banks (Rudy Pankow), the chief reason they wanted to see Reminders of Him, is only in the movie for a handful of minutes, in flashbacks, which was, according to my daughters, completely misleading. They cannot believe JJ from Outer Banks gave up the show to be in this. And it’s insane that he left Outer Banks because his girlfriend was jealous of his co-star (Madison Bailey), who is gay, and still, this girlfriend, Elaine, made JJ from Outer Banks use a stunt double for all of his spicy scenes. And of course, even though he left the show for her, they still broke up. That’s fine. JJ wasn’t even that hot. So, whatever.
But also, the lead in Reminders of Him, Tyriq Withers, isn’t even a very good actor, and he has bald patches in his beard, and he kept clenching his jaw the whole time. Why’s he mogging? And why did they play Coldplay’s “Yellow” so many times? It was the cringiest. And why does the actress (Maika Monroe) breathe so heavily all the time? It’s so distracting.
And also, what a dumb story. That’s so evil. Why would a girl fall in love with the best friend of the guy she accidentally killed in a DUI accident? The whole movie was way too much about the love story between the two leads instead of about the little girl. That would never happen! And the writing was so cringe!
OK, with the eighth-grade girl perspective out of the way, here’s what Reminders of Him is about: After Kenna (Monroe) is released from prison for the vehicular manslaughter of her boyfriend, she returns to the town where it all happened — Laramie, Wyoming — hoping to meet the daughter she delivered while incarcerated. The baby is being raised by the parents of Kenna’s deceased boyfriend, Scotty (JJ from Outer Banks): Patrick (Bradley Whitford) and Grace (Lauren Graham), along with Scotty’s best friend, Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who somehow never met Kenna because during their courtship because he was too busy playing in the NFL. Naturally.
After an injury forced him out of the league, Ledger returned to Laramie, opened a bar, and moved into his childhood home across the street from Grace and Patrick, where he could stay close to Scotty’s daughter, Diem (Zoe Kosovic) — pronounced like an Instagram DM, which, sure. Patrick and Grace want nothing to do with Kenna and have, in fact, taken out a restraining order against her to keep her away from her own daughter, whose parental rights were terminated while Kenna was in prison.
Naturally, Kenna and Ledger fall in love, but must keep it secret from Patrick and Grace, lest they cut Ledger off from Diem as well. And if you think you know exactly where this is headed, you are absolutely correct. There is nothing about Reminders of Him that cannot be predicted from the first ten minutes.
The eighth-grade girls are right: it is not a particularly good movie. That said — and notwithstanding the two versions of “Yellow” (one by Coldplay, one by Morgan Harper-Jones) — it does boast a reasonably solid soundtrack if you have any tolerance for alt-country (Lainey Wilson also turns up in a small role). JJ from Outer Banks is decent within his limited screentime, and while Withers is, indeed, not a great actor, he is a captivating screen presence and does some of the heavy lifting. Maika Monroe, meanwhile, feels distinctly ill-suited to romantic drama — the Scream Queen in the weepy prestige romance is a casting choice that doesn’t make much sense. Whitford and Graham do their level best with thin material, and occasionally manage to surface something that resembles real emotion.
But the girls nailed the core problem: Colleen Hoover’s whole schtick is engineering romances between people who absolutely should not be falling for each other, and in this case, the premise doesn’t just strain credulity — it is genuinely uncomfortable. The love story crowds out the one relationship the film actually needed to develop - the mother and daughter.
When your harshest critics are the audience most primed to love it, that’s not a great sign. Reminders of Him is serviceable enough as a cry-on-the-couch streaming watch, but as a theatrical flick, it’s strictly for the unconditional CoHo faithful — and even they may leave feeling a little cheated that JJ from Outer Banks wasn’t in it enough.
