Everything can change in a moment. Drink driving, crash, dead boyfriend, prison, daughter, poverty; regret, guilt, judgment, resentment, assumption, blame. Colleen Hoover has sold approximately twenty million books, according to Wikipedia. She has much to teach me about how to propel a page-turner from the abundant energy created from a split-second event with which her readers can identify. This energy vibrates along precise emotional frequencies, accelerates to levels of almost unbearable intensity, radiates in all directions like a whirlwind, concentrates and recapitulates its message, and ends in a convincing manner. The medium-sized novel “Reminders of Him” has been funnelled into a two-hour movie by Universal Pictures and is showing now at the Montrose Playhouse.
Freed from doing time for Scotty’s death, Kenna heads straight from jail to the town where their child is raised. Her cab pulls over en route; she steals his cross from the crash site. She begs a discount from the plainspoken proprietor of the down-at-heel “Paradise Apartments.” “You take a kitten and I’ll leave the electric on for three weeks,” the owner says. “Paradise,” with a flickering “S,” is more like one of those two- or three-storey American motels with guest-room doors which open onto an outside corridor. Her room has a rusted sink, peeling brown wallpaper, and no bed; she dresses as the least ambitious customer of the local charity shops—one of her T-shirts sports a faded “Mountain Dew” logo. The kitten meows; “I’m hungry too,” she says. There is a central courtyard which hosts a Mother’s Day party; most of the tenants are single moms with young children. In some of her best scenes, Maika Monroe, as Kenna, grapples with repeated, rude rebuffs when pleading for minimum-wage jobs. “We can’t have folks with a record, honey,” one employer says. “We’ve been burned too many times.” How can “we guarantee our customers’ happiness and safety” if we allow ex-cons to work here, asks another. Ms Hoover is kicking about a question for her audience, How is rehabilitation supposed to work then?
On the well-to-do , spick-and-span side of town, Kenna’s daughter grows up with Scotty’s mannerly, slightly nosy parents, whose opposite neighbour is Ledger, their son’s guilt-ridden, bar-owning best friend. Kenna and Ledger fall for each other. But Ms Hoover’s twist on the standard boy-meets-girl story is the imbalance of information between boy and girl, which is as a flea to an elephant; how would Ledger know that Kenna is the person who caused the death of his friend if they never met? Kenna has concealed the predestined reason for her arrival in town. And so the central tension vibrating through the whole story is whether Kenna is manipulating Ledger and their love affair is fraudulent. Kenna denies this—on balance the audience never quite believes her. If director Vanessa Caswill intended to portray this ambivalence by shooting not-quite-believable chemistry between her leads, then she succeeded.
In one illuminating scene, the filmmakers ask Kenna to narrate the moment when everything changes for Scotty’s parents; the moment that the police ring the doorbell “[to use] words like ‘sorry,’ and ‘accident,’ and ‘didn’t make it.’” The genius of the scene is that, while the conversation feels real to the audience, Kenna is imagining it—she wasn’t there; she had been arrested. The dialog continues, “I’m the one they blame, and I understand why.” But “here I am, back in their lives, asking for one thing—to meet our daughter.”
Ledger is played by Tyriq Withers, a terrific leading man whom Playhouse audiences most recently admired in in the horror film “Him,” which I reviewed in October, and about which I wrote, “There is nothing about “Him” that isn’t exceptional.” It was one of the standouts of 2025. A complex political horror with a robust point of view awards an actor much greater range than a romance; to compare the two directly would not be the correct use of my space here. Mr Withers is one of those actors who can at once blaze with red-hot fury at Kenna’s betrayal, plot revenge, and convey shame for his own gullibility: the moment when everything changes for him is the moment when Kenna appears in the suburban street to push her way into the life of her daughter. “Your rights were terminated,” he says. “Goddamn.”
“Reminders” swerves the lazy filmmaking which can infect romantic films and take root. But an obsession with Ledger driving his truck, often to pick up Kenna, grates; this overweighs the “will they/won’t they” thread and fails to hide a lack of storyboarding imagination. There are occasional grumbling continuity errors—a beautiful sunset is connected by (obviously) a short truck journey to a scene filmed in the torrential rain and populated by an umbrella-free cast.
Sipping a second Brechin-roasted Maison Dieu “Playhouse Blend” coffee and eating a toasted sandwich, a cheese-and-tomato sandwich, from the new lunch menu after the matinée one afternoon last week, I was preoccupied. I took my time. If the crime writer engages her audience with physical facts, Ms Hoover’s skill is to persuade hers to weigh emotional evidence and then change sides. We don’t trust Kenna when she says, say, “It was stupid to just assume they would let me be part of their life. I just wanna meet the human that Scotty and I made.” But the trust we loaned Ledger and Kenna’s mother-in-law is broken when they read Kenna’s intimate letters to Scotty after his death. Do they feel that her previous conviction awards them the moral right to take the notebooks? Ms Hoover manoeuvres us into setting aside our misgivings about Kenna’s motives and lend her our trust again. “There was a ‘before you,’” she writes. “There was a ‘during you.’ I never thought there would be an ‘after you.’”
Adam Poole
17th March 2026
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