Imagine learning in one horrifying moment that your husband and sister were having a long-term affair, that both have died in the same car accident, and that your nephew’s paternity may never be known.
That premise alone screams operatic heartbreak. Yet Regretting You, the latest collaboration between filmmaker Josh Boone and author Colleen Hoover, feels strangely numb. What could have been a raw and emotional dissection of loss becomes a slow-moving film that observes tragedy from behind glass.
Boone directs from a script by Susan McMartin, adapting Hoover’s bestselling novel into something as emotionally flat as a television drama stretched to feature length. At its center is Morgan (Allison Williams), a mother balancing grief, betrayal, and guilt alongside her teenage daughter, Clara (McKenna Grace).
When a car crash takes both Morgan’s husband, Chris (Scott Eastwood), and her sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), the film reveals an unfolding chain of family deceit. But the sharpness of that revelation never cuts deep. Instead, the story drifts like a cloud that never quite rains.
The film’s structure toggles between past and present; 2007 teenage nostalgia collides with the dull ache of adulthood in 2024, but the emotional transitions are as stiff as their time jumps. The younger versions of Morgan and Jonah (Dave Franco) circle unfulfilled attraction; the older ones hover in guilt and confusion.
It should be messy, chaotic, and painfully human. Instead, Boone and McMartin render grief like an instruction manual, precise but sterile.
The Problem With Polite Heartbreak
Regretting You belongs to that strain of young adult melodrama that thrives on big emotions and moral reckonings. However, where The Fault in Our Stars (also by Boone) thrived on passion and grounded pain, this film barely feels alive.
The emotions are too tidy, the confrontations too polite. Even when the film dances around uncomfortable truths, it refuses to let its characters fall apart the way real people do.
Allison Williams struggles against the production’s restraint. Her Morgan carries enormous narrative weight, grieving not only her husband’s death but also the betrayal that followed.
Yet her face never fully communicates the density of that pain. She moves through grief like someone rehearsing sadness rather than feeling it. Even when confronting Jonah, the man who silently loved her for decades and is now reeling from the same loss, there’s no heat in their exchanges.
Dave Franco’s Jonah fares even worse. He spends most of the film whispering through scenes, lip-biting, and staring at the floor as if every emotion must stay half-swallowed.
His chemistry with Williams is virtually nonexistent; their grief scenes feel choreographed instead of cathartic. The supposed tension of unresolved love shrinks into awkward small talk.
The only heartbeat comes from McKenna Grace’s performance as Clara. She portrays adolescence with both defiance and tenderness, grounding the film with genuine emotion. Clara’s disbelief, anger, and slow realization of the truth about her family give the story its only sense of momentum.
Her scenes, especially the ones wrestling with teenage dreams and emotional distrust, offer fleeting glimpses of sincerity. Grace understands the story better than the film does; she finds what it means to be young and surrounded by adult hypocrisy.
The Weight of Regret Misused
Colleen Hoover’s writing has always thrived on heightened emotion, grief, love, and the ache of forgiveness wrapped in big moral gestures.
Translating that to film requires a nuanced touch: too restrained and you lose emotional urgency; too exaggerated and it turns syrupy. Boone’s adaptation lands squarely in the first problem: it refuses to feel.
Regretting You (Credit: Constantin Film)
For a story about devastating loss, Regretting You looks strangely calm. The visual tone feels overly polished, with bright lighting even in scenes meant to express despair.
Boone’s filmmaking flattens every tragedy into visual monotony. The camera rarely lingers long enough on faces to reveal conflict, instead cutting away before emotion can register.
Even more puzzling is the film’s reliance on text messages as storytelling devices. Animated bubbles pop up constantly, while voiceovers read their contents aloud as if to double-insure the audience’s understanding.
But rather than deepening intimacy, these moments emphasize distance. No amount of bubble animation can make us feel the connection these characters lack.
The relationship between Clara and her classmate Miller (Mason Thames) could have balanced the heavy adult tension, but it instead mirrors the film’s general blandness.
As for symbolism, Boone and McMartin play it safe. Nearly every emotional beat is accompanied by a song or a monologue that spells out feelings the actors haven’t been allowed to display.
There’s never a moment where silence speaks; the dialogue fills every space, even the ones better left aching. By sanding down the raw edges of Hoover’s story, the filmmakers betray its essence.
When Emotion Becomes an Afterthought
The tragedy of Regretting You isn’t just its plot; it’s the missed opportunity within its premise.
Beneath the melodrama lies a story ripe for tenderness and rage: generational guilt, broken trust, and the shared burden of secrets between parent and child. But the film handles these themes with such excessive caution that its emotional potential evaporates.
Boone’s direction suggests fear of sentimentality, as though breaking composure might break the film itself. Scenes that should vibrate with pain, like the moment Morgan learns her husband’s affair was with her own sister, feel almost procedural.
Even Clara’s discovery of the truth lands without the gut-punch it deserves. Instead of chaos, we get calm confrontation; instead of devastation, a shrug.
The pacing worsens this detachment. The middle stretch feels like a waiting room for an emotional reaction that never arrives.
Conversation replaces confrontation. By the time forgiveness surfaces, it feels mechanical rather than earned. The title itself, Regretting You, promises introspection, but the film never gives us regret’s raw form, only its theory.
Still, McKenna Grace prevents complete collapse. Her energy, humor, and flashes of honesty carry a pulse through the monotony. In a film where adults exchange glances instead of feelings, she makes confusion look alive.
Watching her makes one imagine what a more daring version of this story could have been, one that let its characters cry, break, and claw their way toward forgiveness.
When Tragedy Needs Truth
Regretting You end as it began: quiet, awkward, and emotionally restrained. Morgan and Jonah’s attempts at closure feel rehearsed rather than lived. The script gestures toward the inevitability of regret but never earns it. What remains is a film that feels too careful for its own story.
There are traces of what could have been a study in grief, loss, and misplaced trust, but Boone’s direction suffocates the very feeling it seeks to capture. Between too-smooth lighting, surface-level dialogue, and dull performances from its adult leads, the movie forgets that regret is a visceral experience, not a decorative theme.
A talented young actress like McKenna Grace deserves better; so does Hoover’s material. Somewhere inside this lifeless adaptation lies a story aching to be heard: that grief is messy, that love’s collapse deserves noise, and that forgiveness isn’t found in neat dialogue but in the chaos of heartbreak.
Until someone makes that version, Regretting You will remain true to its title; you’ll probably regret watching it.
Remakes rarely justify their return, especially when the original remains iconic. Yet Hulu’s 2025 reinterpretation of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle tries to dig into modern anxieties of motherhood, mental health, and class tension while remixing Curtis Hanson’s 1992 thriller for a new generation.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Caitlyn, a successful lawyer and mother of two, haunted by the invisible cracks in her seemingly stable life. When she hires Polly (Maika Monroe) as a nanny, the relationship initially appears professional. But from their first shared glance, the tone turns uneasy.
Monroe’s quiet intensity hints that Polly’s motives are not purely domestic. It’s a calculated performance, one that commands the screen through silence.
The film opens with a simple act of goodwill: Caitlyn helps Polly during a landlord dispute. That moment seeds trust, later repaid with deceit. When Polly enters Caitlyn’s household, tension builds in the smallest ways: a misplaced toy, a locked drawer, a child’s whisper that feels off.
Cervera’s approach to tension is subtle at first, drawing the audience into a false sense of coziness. Unfortunately, as the narrative deepens, the suspense falters under half-formed reasoning and late reveals that arrive far too late to bite.
Where the 1992 version turned paranoia into pulp, the new film aims for psychological restraint. What it forgets is catharsis. Cervera’s version replaces the original’s sharp edges with ambiguity, but without emotional weight; that ambiguity drifts rather than intrigues.
Maika Monroe’s Quiet Terror and Winstead’s Frayed Grace
If the movie sustains any momentum, it’s through the magnetic contrast between its two leads. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Caitlyn balances the fatigue of motherhood with flashes of buried guilt.
Her portrayal captures the exhaustion of a modern woman stretched between work, family, and the pressure to appear composed. Her moments of uncertainty feel genuine, particularly when she starts questioning her sanity under Polly’s subtle manipulations.
Maika Monroe’s Polly, however, owns the film’s most intriguing beats. Best known for slow-burn horror roles in films like It Follows, Monroe again thrives in silence. She projects empathy laced with threat, embodying both victim and predator. Her stillness hides storms; her sympathetic demeanor masks deep resentment.
Yet the script’s unwillingness to dive (or rather, go deeper) into Polly’s background dulls her menace. We’re told she’s an orphan from foster care, but that fact remains surface decoration rather than a key to her psyche.
Hints of sexual tension between Caitlyn and Polly pulse beneath their exchanges. It’s subtle at first, lingering touches, stolen glances, until voyeuristic moments briefly tilt the relationship toward obsession.
A scene in which Caitlyn secretly watches Polly’s intimate encounter with another woman feels intentionally provocative but ultimately goes nowhere. The film sets up boundaries worth breaking, then retreats. It suggests transgression without committing to it, as if afraid to alienate viewers.
Raúl Castillo’s Miguel, Caitlyn’s husband, barely registers within this emotional tug-of-war. His presence feels ornamental, another casualty of the script’s reluctance to sharpen supporting characters.
The same goes for the children, who occupy narrative space without shaping tension. Moments meant to evoke fear for their safety feel procedural rather than primal.
When Trauma Meets Missed Opportunity
Thematically, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle gestures toward compelling terrain: women weaponized by trauma, cycles of caretaking turned predatory, and the silent wars fought between those forced to mother without healing themselves first.
Caitlyn’s hinted history with postpartum depression could have anchored the story in painful realism, but the film treats it as a brief footnote.
Instead of exploring how unresolved trauma shapes her parenting or leaves her vulnerable to manipulation, the script uses it as a convenient excuse for others to dismiss her suspicions about Polly.
Cervera touches on class disparity, too, the subtle resentment between an affluent professional and a woman shaped by instability. It’s a promising thread that could have reframed the power play between Caitlyn and Polly as something rooted in economic injustice.
Yet again, the commentary remains suggestive rather than lived-in. The class gap becomes another stylistic choice rather than a driving theme.
There’s also a timid curiosity about female rivalry and misplaced anger. The narrative hints that women, conditioned by patriarchy to internalize rage, may sometimes turn that violence toward each other rather than the system that created their pain.
But the film backs away just as this idea sharpens. Instead, scenes pivot to conventional thriller beats: a misplaced phone, a gaslit confrontation, and a predictable showdown.
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (Credit: Hulu)
Even the final act, built up as the ultimate reckoning between Caitlyn and Polly, deflates under weak tension. The climactic confrontation lacks urgency and emotional payoff. Whatever resolution should exist never feels earned, leaving the film to end not with a scream or sigh but with a shrug.
A Stylish Surface With Shaky Depth
Despite its missteps, it’s clear that Michelle Garza Cervera brings sensitivity and visual refinement to the project. Her compositions, filled with soft lighting and claustrophobic framing, reinforce domestic unease.
The home feels both sanctuary and prison, a neat aesthetic echo of Caitlyn’s suffocating emotional state. The pacing, though slow, reflects deliberate craftsmanship. She knows how to sustain curiosity, even when her screenplay loses direction.
The problem is that nothing lands long enough to linger. Each thematic suggestion, sexual repression, class division, and motherhood’s weight, is lightly brushed, then forgotten. The film teases complexity but never commits. Even the tension between predator and prey evaporates as soon as the film clarifies motivations.
Still, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle remains watchable. Its intrigue depends less on plot coherence and more on chemistry. Watching Winstead and Monroe share a frame is mesmerizing because their performances fill in what the script omits. Their uneasy intimacy becomes the heartbeat holding the film together.
Yet, beyond that fascination, the movie rarely risks true discomfort. It flirts with danger instead of fully confronting it. The result is an experience that sits uncomfortably between a psychological study and a mid-tier thriller, teasing meaning without delivering satisfaction.
The Verdict: Half-Formed Tension, Half-Forgotten Themes
Hulu’s remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is neither a disaster nor a triumph. It’s a film of hesitation, visually sleek, conceptually ambitious, but emotionally restrained.
Every element hints at something sharper: a commentary on motherhood, sexuality, and trauma begging to spill over. Yet the restraint dulls what should be volatile.
Winstead’s grounded realism and Monroe’s eerie commitment strengthen a framework that otherwise collapses under uncertainty. With a few bolder choices, it could have been a formidable reimagining of a 1990s classic. Instead, it exists in limbo, too polite for psychological horror, too soft for melodrama, and too hesitant to scar.
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (2025) doesn’t betray its source; it merely outgrows its nerve along the way. Curiosity keeps you watching, but it’s the frustration that lingers once the credits roll. Sometimes, suggestion can be thrilling, but here, it feels like a filmmaker afraid of her own power.
