Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers in Reminders of Him
REMINDERS OF HIM
My first exposure to the romantic-melodrama output of bestselling novelist Colleen Hoover – the Colleen Hoeuvre, if you will – came with 2024's film version of the author's It Ends with Us. (For the record, I have not read any of Hoover's two-dozen-plus books, and don't intend to start.) As adapted by Christy Hall, the movie was as contrived as these things usually are. But it was touching and worthy nonetheless, and Blake Lively was pretty spectacular in it … even if the drama never got quite as brutal as Lively's and director/co-star Justin Baldoni's subsequent court case. Then came last fall's Regretting You, which was adapted by Susan McMartin, and which was such a mishmash of lunatic plotting and tonal inconsistencies, particularly in regard to performance, that it left me slack-jawed, wondering if my enjoyment of It Ends with Us was evidence of a slowly expanding brain tumor.
Well, now we have director Vanessa Caswill's Reminders of Him, yet another Hoover adaptation, and the first one in which the author herself has had a hand in the screenplay (alongside co-scribe Lauren Levine). I'm happy to report that it's not bad. It's not good, mind you; there are, as usual, buckets full of eye-rolling coincidences and conveniences, and the movie is sadly shameless about employing a toddler and a young woman with Down syndrome for cheap sentiment and cheaper laughs. But like It Ends with Us, Caswill's outing is more surprisingly tough-minded than it needed to be, the leads share genuine chemistry, and I didn't feel like a sap for letting a few admittedly manipulated tears roll down my cheeks. I kinda liked it. And if, after three films over 20 months, my up-and-down reactions continue on this trajectory, I'm already looking forward to the Colleen Hoover adaptation after the next one.
This one, in the meantime, is about Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe), newly paroled from prison after serving six years for vehicular homicide. The deceased passenger was her boyfriend Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow), and not long after being jailed, Kenna gave birth to their daughter Diem, who was consequently placed in the care of Scotty's parents Grace and Patrick (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford). Upon her release, Kenna chooses to move back to Laramie, Wyoming, to hopefully reconnect with her child, knowing full well that Scotty's angry folks want nothing to do with her and want her as far away from Diem as possible.
Kenny gets a crap apartment – the landlord is played by Schitt's Creek's Jennifer Robertson! – and a crap job, and eventually wanders into a downtown tavern owned by Ledger Ward (Tyriq Withers), who just happened to be Scotty's best friend, and who just happens to live directly across the street from the surviving Landrys and Diem. Will romance between Kenna and Ledger bloom? Will Kenna's return lead to all sorts of ugly encounters, and near-encounters, between Kenna and the Landrys? Will there be tears and hugs and flashbacks and revelations and gentle comedy and acoustic soundtrack numbers and a cute-as-eff kitten for audiences to fawn over? Sorry: No spoilers. But yes. There will.
I have to concede that Hoover and Levine do a decent job of making the more impossible-to-buy scenarios in Reminders of Him somewhat easier to swallow. How is it that Ledger lives directly across the street from the Landys? Because he was Scotty's across-the-street best friend, during childhood and beyond, who moved into his folks' house after they relocated. Why does Ledger not recognize Kenna immediately as either Scotty's girlfriend or the woman responsible for Scotty's death? Because he was out of state playing in the NFL for the Denver Broncos, and missed personal exposure to their months-long romance entirely. (You'd think, though, via news photos, he'd at least have a “Haven't I seen you somewhere before …?” response when she enters his bar that first time.) Other contrivances, though, are tougher to stomach. After Ledger forms a bond with Kenna, and dedicates himself to making sure the Landrys never come in contact with her, why the freakout when he learns that Grace is on her way to the grocery store – the same store in which Kenna is bagging groceries? Did neither he nor Kenna anticipate that, at some point, Grace might eventually need to shop?
But no one (I hope) goes to a Colleen Hoover romantic melodrama expecting realism. At best, we're hoping for realism under the circumstances, and this is where Caswill's movie excels. I didn't believe in the blithely fortuitous narrative, or the cutesiness of the interactions at Ledger's bar (with Nicholas Duvernay as Ledger's bestie) and Kenna's apartment complex (with Monika Myers as Kenna's non-judgmental Down-syndrome ally), or, near the end, the supreme invasion of privacy that seemed to me a romantic deal-breaker but was instead treated as a necessary act of emotional healing. I did, however, believe in the performances.
Maika Monroe, a trustworthy Scream Queen in horror flicks ranging from It Follows to Longlegs, is especially fine. From the film's start, she at no point begs for the audience's love, or even our basic empathy; Kenna has been imprisoned for six years, and it sucked, and she's not going to make herself palatable for anyone's comfort. (The friend I saw the movie with said she spent much of the film willing herself to like the character – which, I'd argue, meant that Monroe was doing her job.) It's watching the imposed steeliness of Monroe's portrayal slowly begin to crack that her performance grows immeasurably in terms of empathy and understanding, and when Kenna finally allows herself to smile – and Monroe has a great smile – it feels like sunlight miraculously appearing on the gloomiest of days.
Withers, meanwhile, is every bit Monroe's performance equal, and is absolutely magical in his scenes with Zoe Kosovic, who plays five-year-old Diem; he's the not-by-blood uncle of anyone's dreams. Granted stronger material than he had in last fall's football horror Him (which might tell you more about Him than it does Reminders of Him), the actor is devastatingly sincere and emotionally present, and he and Monroe achieve a warily relaxed rhythm, their bond over love for the same guy gradually morphing into something wholly independent of Scotty. Romantic melodramas live and die on their leads' rapport, and unlike in Regretting You, or even It Ends with Us, the stars here feel like they're on the same page from start to finish.
Reminders of Him is given immeasurable added impact by Graham, who knows precisely how to break hearts through subtly conflicted readings and physicality, and Whitford, one of few actors on the planet incapable of being dull. (As my pal and I agreed, he's also way more handsome in his white-haired and -beared stage than he was during his West Wing glory days.) But this latest Hoover adaptation would likely be an unexpected good time even if its focus were solely on Kenna and Ledger, and maybe on Diem, too … though the performance of young Kosovic doesn't come without challenges.
To be clear, the girl is inarguably adorable, and gratefully, Caswill doesn't ever push her toward emotional payoffs that the youth perhaps couldn't pull off. I still wish, though, that it was easier to understand what Kosovic was saying. (Subtitles would've certainly looked stupid … but may have been helpful.) Her frequently fuzzy diction is hardly a detriment – that's how five-year-olds talk. Yet I'd argue that maybe half of Kosovic's ain't-she-cute? punchlines are rendered incomprehensible by sheer dint of this charmer being an understandably marble-mouthed toddler, implying that maybe Hoover and Levine shouldn't have written for her quite so many laugh lines. Sometimes, especially with the five-and-under set, silence can be golden.
UNDERTONE
Man, how I wish I enjoyed the A24 fright film Undertone more than I did. Scratch that. Man, how I wish I enjoyed the A24 fright film Undertone full stop.
Its previews were legitimately chilling, suggesting a threatening paranormal experience coming to fruition through a podcast devoted to paranormal experiences. The sound effects were creepy and clever. The setup was admirable: Just one visible character who speaks (Nina Kiri's Evy), and her nearly comatose mom (Michèle Duquet), in an old, spacious, ripe-for-haunting house. And writer/director Ian Tuason's camera, wielded by cinematographer Graham Beasley, kept slowly suggesting that profoundly terrifying events were right around the corner. For 94 minutes, we kept turning corners. I was never once terrified. Or even mildly frightened.
In the film, Evy and her London-based partner Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) host The Undertone, a podcast devoted to proving/debunking the supernatural. Justin claims to have a humdinger episode lined up, as he recently received 10 audio files from someone known only as Mike, whose girlfriend Jessa has been talking in her sleep in increasingly unsettling fashion. Justin and Evy agree to air these recordings on the show, their plan to decipher whatever hidden messaging there may be in Jessa's ramblings, most of them tied to nursery rhymes and their encoded messaging about the killing of children.
But right from the start, as one file leads to another, there's a disconnect between what Justin hears and what our audience surrogate Evy hears, because Justin keeps insisting that he's clocking presumably otherworldly hints about murder, and Evy – and we – aren't getting it. A few hikes of volume later, we kinda hear what Justin hears, but it's still sketchy. Undertone subsequently goes on to present all 10 increasingly “horrifying” audio files, while Evy herself contends with the idea that her mother's house has been engulfed with whatever supernatural forces were on the recordings. Meaning, in this ultra-low-budget outing that reportedly cost a mere $500,000, lights flicker, odd thumps and bangs are heard, a hidden Virgin Mary statuette keeps reappearing, and Evy, who has recently learned she's pregnant, considers whether to abort her child.
I'm saddened to say that this synopsis probably makes the movie sound far more interesting than it ever is. Let's begin with The Undertone podcast itself, which, as presented, I honestly don't understand. When not recording, Evy and Justin share playful yet emotionally connected banter, and there are enough script hints to fill in the blanks on their relationship before Justin went overseas. (It's implied that they were friends, and maybe more, when living in Waterloo, Iowa.) But after the “official” recording starts and the files are played, it becomes impossible to determine what is meant for eventual broadcast and what isn't, and when Justin's fear is legit yet not meant for public consumption, and what, exactly, is frightening him in the first place. (The job of editing all this incoherence into a podcast is likely a scarier prospect than any number of supernatural happenings.)
Admittedly, there are some engaging detours involving how nursery rhymes are inherently cautionary tales. Even they, however, get twisted into meaninglessness when it turns out that, à la The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, every recording needs to be run in reverse for the messaging to be made clear, and even then we barely hear what Tuason evidently wants us to hear. Simply put, The Undertone seems like the most boring podcast on earth. And events don't get less boring when Evy is away from the mic, and there's nothing to do but watch morose Evy wander the rooms and look in on Mom and contemplate her pregnancy and gauge the weirdness that, in truth, is only semi-weird at best.
This repetitive nothingness would almost surely have been more arresting with a Jessie Buckley- or Florence Pugh-level talent who could've made Evy's experience visceral and wrenching. Despite working hard under challenging circumstances, though, Nina Kiri is not that talent. She's admirable enough and certainly dedicated to her task. But Kiri doesn't appear capable, yet, of commanding the screen, and Undertone is essentially a one-woman show – this may be too big an assignment for a relative screen novice to pull off. The faults of Tuason's film, though, are hardly hers. Maybe they're more accurately mine.
I didn't find the recordings scary. I didn't find the reactions to them legitimate. I didn't get the connections between the nursery rhymes and the Christ imagery and Evy's pregnancy and the incessant crayon drawing and the flood of calls – from the beyond? – after the playing of the tenth audio file. I didn't get it, and more to the point, I didn't care; I tend to gauge my disinterest in a movie based on my number of yawns, and after hitting a dozen on Tuesday afternoon, I stopped keeping track. (Of all horror flicks, this one reminded of none so much as 2023's micro-budgeted Skinamarink, which boasted a similarly bare-bones premise and left me similarly underwhelmed and exhausted.) Tuason's admirable effort does deliver some suitably unsettling sound effects, particularly in its final minutes. Had I not been diligent about staying awake for the mere 94 minutes Undertone asked of me, though, my most honest personal sound effect would've been a snore.
