‘Reminders of Him’ review: A grief that lingers, for better or worse

Reminders of Him is a faithful CoHo adaptation that tests your patience before it breaks your heart.

Reminders of Him refuses to let you look away from grief — it just pulls up a chair next to you in it, until the very end when it finally lets you come up for air. That restraint is both the film’s greatest commitment and its most demanding quality. And depending on how much Colleen Hoover means to you, it will either be exactly the film you needed or a very long, very heavy sit.

The story, briefly.

Adapted from Hoover’s bestselling novel of the same name, the film follows Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe), a young woman freshly released from prison after a drunk driving accident killed her boyfriend seven years earlier. She returns to the small town where her daughter is being raised by her late boyfriend’s family, the Landry’s (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham), who want nothing to do with her. The one crack in that wall is Ledger Ward (Tyriq Withers), the boyfriend’s best friend, who finds himself caught between loyalty to the family he’s known for years and something he didn’t expect to feel for the woman they all blame.

It is, on paper, a story about forgiveness. In practice, it’s a story about what happens when the people who owe you nothing are the only ones who can give you everything. That’s a genuinely moving premise, and director Vanessa Caswill handles it with enough care to keep the film grounded in something that feels emotionally real.

A director in control of one thing.

Caswill’s clearest strength here is emotional temperature. She knows exactly how tender and bleak she wants this to feel, and she maintains that register with real discipline. The camera never abandons Kenna, even when every other character in the film has. There’s an intentionality to the way Caswill frames her protagonist’s isolation that suggests a director who arrived on set with a clear and considered vision.

Where the film is less sure-footed is in its transitions. Scenes that should function as pivots sometimes land as pauses. It’s a film that takes its time getting where it’s going, and your patience with that will likely depend on how invested you are in Kenna’s journey from the start.

The pacing problem.

This is probably where audiences will diverge most sharply. Reminders of Him moves at a grief-soaked pace for the majority of its runtime, which is a defensible creative choice — grief doesn’t move quickly, and Caswill clearly isn’t interested in rushing it. But the script occasionally leans on dialogue to carry emotional weight that might have landed harder through stillness and restraint. Characters sometimes tell each other how they feel in moments where the film might have trusted the audience to feel it themselves.

It’s a minor frustration in an otherwise sincere film, and it doesn’t derail the experience so much as slow it down in places where a little more momentum would have helped. The final act, when the film finally allows itself some warmth and light, arrives with genuine relief. Whether the buildup fully earns that release will depend on the viewer — but it’s hard to deny that when the film lets you breathe, you really feel it.

On the performances.

The cast is committed throughout, which matters enormously in a film this emotionally demanding. Monroe carries Kenna’s exhaustion and longing with quiet consistency — there’s a physicality to the performance, a kind of worn-down sincerity, that keeps you sympathetic even when the script doesn’t give her much new ground to cover. It’s a performance that does its job reliably without often exceeding it.

The supporting cast does solid work within roles that are largely defined by their relationship to Kenna’s guilt. The Landry family, who function as the film’s primary antagonists, are given just enough backstory to make their coldness legible but not quite enough to make it complicated. That’s a missed opportunity in a film that is otherwise genuinely interested in the gray areas of accountability.

The CoHo question.

It would be dishonest to review this film without acknowledging what it is and where it comes from. Colleen Hoover has built one of the more remarkable fanbases in contemporary publishing — devoted, emotionally fluent, and deeply protective of the stories that have meant something to them. Reminders of Him the novel is no exception, and the adaptation arrives with that readership already waiting, already primed, already prepared to feel everything the film is offering.

Caswill isn’t here to reinvent the source material or push it somewhere unexpected. She’s here to deliver the book’s emotional experience faithfully and with genuine tenderness, and on those terms she largely succeeds. The CoHo faithful will find what they came for — the ache, the slow burn, the earned exhale at the end — and they won’t be wrong to love it.

For everyone else, the film is a somewhat more qualified experience. Not because it fails at what it’s trying to do, but because what it’s trying to do is so specifically calibrated for one kind of viewer that everyone else is essentially welcome but not quite the intended guest. That’s not a criticism so much as a context. Some films are made for everyone, and some films are made for someone. Reminders of Him knows exactly who it’s for.

The bottom line.

Reminders of Him is a film made with care, helmed by a director who understands grief as a visual and emotional language, and carried by a cast that never takes the material lightly. Its pacing asks something of you, and its script occasionally settles for saying things the film could have shown instead. But there’s a sincerity running through it that’s hard to dismiss, and a tenderness in its best moments that reminds you why stories like this find the audiences they do.

It won’t be for everyone, and it doesn’t especially try to be. But for the audience it was made for, it will likely feel like exactly enough. For the rest of us, it’s a quiet, imperfect, occasionally affecting film. Just maybe don’t watch it on a day when you’re already feeling fragile.

Reminders of Him is in theaters on Friday, March 13. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures. Read more articles by Alyshia Kelly here.