I suppose if there’s a hell and I die and go there, Reminders of Him will be the only movie available, and it will play every day in mandatory screenings.
Based on a novel by the mega-selling Colleen Hoover, it’s a tearjerker about a thirtyish woman named Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe) just out of prison, having served several years after her conviction on manslaughter charges. She’d been driving while impaired when she got into a car crash that killed her boyfriend Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow). Now she’s trying to put her life together again, finding an apartment and a job in her small Wyoming hometown, hoping to regain visiting privileges so she can see her and Scotty’s five-year-old daughter Diem (Zoe Kosovic), whom she bore in a prison hospital. The problem is that her daughter is in the custody of Scotty’s affluent parents, the Landrys, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), who refuse to have anything to do with her. And Scotty’s best friend Ledger Ward (Tyriq Withers), who lives across the street from the Landrys and has devoted himself to helping raise Diem, is equally determined to protect the child from Kenna’s presumably evil influence.
Problem is, Ledger is an ex-NFL football player and local bar owner who’s very hot, and Kenna is also pretty hot, so naturally in a film such as this, they’ve got to swiftly overcome their antipathy and fall snoggily in love and hook up a lot in secret, so Grace and Patrick won’t find out. Only, of course, they do find out and ultimately have to establish some sort of civilized arrangement with Kenna so she can see her daughter, which they should’ve done in the first place anyway.
The presentation of characters in this film reflects a kind of teenagers-forever mentality, in which everyone acts out unbridled but shallow emotions in a series of poses and pouts and flounces and snitty stormings off. Monroe in particular acts the role of a damaged and deeply alienated person just released…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
