Unemployment, single parenting, drugs, prison, lip gloss and slow-motion sunset montages to Coldplay’s Yellow while snogging a topless hunk? It can only mean one thing. The Colleen Hoover school of social realism is back — and this time it’s more idiotic than ever.
It’s been almost two years since It Ends with Us, another Hoover adaptation, proved that disturbing domestic abuse and sudsy fairytale romance were a hit combination — and that success was unaffected by the legal mêlée involving the film’s star, Blake Lively, and her director and co-star, Justin Baldoni.
However, this version of Hoover’s bestseller from 2022, adapted by the author and the screenwriter Lauren Levine, is so silly, gauzy and preposterous that it packs all the emotional wallop of a perfume commercial or that Robbie Williams video for Feel in which he goes horse riding with Daryl Hannah.
The setting is Laramie, Wyoming (actual location: Calgary), into which strolls our heroine Kenna (Maika Monroe). She’s returning home after five years in the slammer for the manslaughter of her boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), whom she killed in a car accident while she was unknowingly pregnant and high on cannabis gummies. That pregnancy resulted in baby Diem, who was cruelly taken from Kenna in the prison birthing room and handed over to Scotty’s best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a man who is gorgeous, sensitive, compassionate, gorgeous, altruistic, financially responsible, gorgeous, creative and, most important of all, totally ripped.
During Kenna and Ledger’s meet-cute in a late-night bar, Kenna recognises that the sexual tension between them is thermonuclear but also that they must never consummate their love. Why? Not quite sure. If they coupled up it would make dramatic sense, provide Diem (Zoe Kosovic) with a reconstituted family and validate Ledger as the father he’s been all along. Nobody seems to think it would be a betrayal of Scotty’s memory, either. But no, they simply cannot be together because, er, it’s sexier that way?
Lots of pointless narrative padding follows as the film slides towards the territory occupied by social dramas, such as Lollipop and Earth Mama, about penniless single mothers under pressure. Only here poverty, exclusion and isolation are erotic and glamorous and fun. Obviously.
★★☆☆☆
12A, 114min
In cinemas
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