Regretting You: Not Sweet Enough
by Lily Nobel, Staff Writer
When I first started watching Regretting You (2025, dir. Josh Boone) I assumed , because of the colors, that it would be kinda cool. In grainy blacks and drowning blues that lend a manic, neon complexion to the actors, a teenage girl takes a pregnancy test in a gas station bathroom while her friend, a guy wearing ugly plastic glasses, steals a six pack to bring to the beach. The voices have the squeakiness of people playing dorks in an old horror movie. When “When You Were Young” by the Killers plays (diegetically!) over the radio, you feel like something bad is going to happen. Weird. Interesting. Also, the audio quality was really poor and there were Spanish subtitles.
This was all because I was watching the movie on a pirating site two days before it became available on streaming, so the copy online was ripped from a Spanish-language cinema somewhere. I gave up watching that version because it was too hard to hear the dialogue and decided to just wait until it was available on streaming, so the pirated copy would be better. When I watched it the other night, however, it was worse, largely because the weirdness was gone — there wasn’t any particular visual or auditory tact at all, nothing inventive. There is almost nothing to say about how this movie looks, sounds, or feels. Maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s not, but this movie certainly doesn’t make a good argument for being what it is.
What’s a good way to spend your free time? In my opinion, if you’ve got forty-five minutes to kill at the end of your day and you’re either going to spend it reading the most important, gritty AIDS memoir of the 80s or reading a romantasy book you found on TikTok, it doesn’t matter which book you choose. It amounts to nothing; you’re doing whatever you’re doing for your own pleasure. In the good person/bad person game, your leisure time scores you 0 points either way. I’m not making the argument that you might as well watch this movie just because, though, because this movie makes me think about what fun looks like.
So fine, whatever, Regretting You is full of dumb shit. People say things like, “my soul is dying” and “break the law for pizza???” “it’s good pizza!!!” Miller, a main love interest, is the coolest guy in school, which is established by characters repeating, “Miller?? But he’s the coolest guy in school!!!” My friends described the acting as “poor, abhorrent, overwrought, unsubtle, and hammy/ham-fisted.” Maybe who cares? You can make the argument that people don’t watch a movie like this for the writing or the acting. They watch it for the romance, the relationship-goals relationships, the tension and release, the “steaminess,” a kind of wish fulfillment where you get to see men being sexy and a little worshipful, and watch things work out for messy, cute women and girls who the viewer can see herself, (or aspire to see herself) in.
But Regretting You doesn’t give you that either. The romance is not particularly sweet or thrilling. Moments like Miller sticking his hand down Clara’s shorts to put a five dollar bill in her pocket while an explosion of goopy music plays don’t convince you that she wants him, not when the whole landscape is already saturated with adoration and elevated behavior. There’s no significance to the moment when he forcefully wipes a stray blot of makeup off of Clara’s face at the movie theater while the same music plays — it’s not sexy because there’s nothing to back it up, no dimension in the characters in the story or the performance of the actors. A climactic scene at the end where Morgan shows up in the rain to confess her feelings to Jonah, with dialogue that really could’ve been quite sweet, is undercut when he baby-birds her a watermelon Jolly Rancher he’s been sucking on for two minutes. It’s kinda porny and kinda just, whatever. It doesn’t make your heart flutter. Why would it? They’re standing in the dark, arms kind of gesturing towards each other, delivering lines like they’re in an Amazon commercial.
This movie believes resolutely in cute, happy endings for beautiful people with sexy moments throughout the journey. But it doesn’t have a whole lot of cuteness, a whole lot of happiness, a whole lot of beauty or sexiness. It just wasn’t any fun. If all you want from your one-movie’s-worth of free time is to live a little dream, bat a little eyelash, why not, good for you – there are much worse pursuits than the pursuit of a little squee. But look somewhere other than Regretting You.
