After being released from prison, Kenna (Maika Monroe) is determined to build a new life with her daughter — but the child’s hostile grandparents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) are equally determined to keep her away.
It’s the little things that make people fall in love: small kindnesses and moments of beauty, certainly, but also flubs and foibles and failings. Unfortunately, it’s all that texture, those hints of depth and complexity, that are missing from the latest Colleen Hoover novel adaptation, a romance novel with every edge sanded down to a shiny, flat nothingness.
The premise suggested a little more conflict than we get: Maika Monroe’s Kenna returns to Wyoming after years in prison, hoping to establish contact with the young daughter she hasn’t met since birth. But little Diem’s (Zoe Kosovic) paternal grandparents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) want nothing to do with the woman they blame for killing their son Scotty (Rudy Pankow). Meanwhile, Kenna sparks with their neighbour Ledger (Tyriq Withers). But he’s the best friend of her late boyfriend and a sort of surrogate dad to Diem, and struggles to reconcile the monstrous stories he’s heard about Kenna with the woman he’s attracted to.
If Withers comes off as likeable, that’s only because he does his best to convey that his character does have flaws somewhere —we just haven’t seen them here.
Director Vanessa Caswill has done lots of solid TV, like the BBC’s Little Women adaptation, but here there’s little for her to muster but two beautiful young people trying and failing to stay away from one another against the stunning backdrops of the Wyoming mountains. They have lots of angst about how their relationship could impact Diem, her grandparents and the memory of the late Scotty, but mostly that takes a backseat to some boringly written flirting. The leads do their best, but Monroe seems a little uncomfortable with the sheer lack of substance. If Withers comes off as likeable, that’s only because he does his best to convey that his character does have flaws somewhere —we just haven’t seen them here.
Every problem in this film could be solved by a 15-minute sit-down between the four key characters — and in fact pretty much is, in the end — and that makes all the dithering feel forced. It’s commendable to decide that no-one has to be an outright bad guy, because that’s true to life, but if you’re so committed to realism, you might want characters with psychological depth and complexity and fewer lingering shots of cut-off jeans and yearninggazes.
It’s easy on the eye, and indeed the brain, but this is nowhere near as sharply written or plotted as it should be to bring these characters to life.
