Reminders of Him is a needlessly self-conscious film. Like the Nicholas Sparks canon before this Colleen Hoover wave (It Ends with Us; Forgetting You), the film plays melodrama as grounded drama, which often drives stray target-audience members, like unaware boyfriends, critics, and the overly serious, insane. But Vanessa Caswill’s (Love at First Sight; Little Women) direction is so bread-and-butter solid that sanity is back on the menu. It is emotionally congruent with textbook “need vs. obstacle” construction in each scene, even when the structure holding itself might raise a psychiatrist’s eyebrow. For those who watch bog-standard studio fare from the 1990s and lament the falling standards of cinematography with “we used to be a real country,” know that cinematographer Tim Ives (Scream 7) is on the case. He once again displays the high-standard-but-nothing-outrageously-stylish cinematography that made Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret (2023) a visual delight. Together with Caswill, he makes Maika Monroe (Longlegs; It Follows) and Tyriq Withers (HIM; I Know What You Did Last Summer) look like the movie stars they’re trying to be.
In the most pedestrian, solid-double way, the movies are so back.
L-R: Tyriq Withers as Ledger and Maika Monroe as Kenna in REMINDER OF HIM, directed by Vanessa Caswill. Photo Credit: Michelle Faye / Universal Pictures. © Universal Studios.
Reminders of Him is the story of Kenna (Monroe), a woman who has been released from prison early on good behavior. Convicted of a DUI and manslaughter, she has returned home as an infamous outcast. She hopes to become responsible enough for her dead fiancé’s parents to let her see the daughter she had while in prison. This simple throughline gets emotionally complicated when she accidentally falls in love with said dead fiancé’s childhood best friend whom she hadn’t met, but who sacrificed everything to help raise her daughter like a father.
“Who wouldn’t want a kitten?”
The film is, first and foremost, a fantasy of comfortable overconstruction. Flashbacks to a “Dollar Den” store meet-cute are set in the nicest dollar store that has never existed ever in any zip code in America and never will. An alcoholic’s job as a bartender is given lip-service but no dramatic tension, a cheap room for rent is given at a discount if you take a kitten from the land-lady, and there’s a down-syndrome bit-part elevated by the hilarious Monika Myers. It would be easy and profitable for her role to feel like it offers a cynical glance, a focus-grouped choice made specifically to capture the attention of suburban white moms whose social activism is limited to dining at coffee shops staffed by workers with special needs, but careful direction, great chemistry, and again, Myers’s good performance, changed a token character into a funny recurring bit that brought the house down every time. And so it goes with the rest of the film. A recurring lame joke about a pigeon. A Mother’s Day scene so pivotal I panicked and checked the calendar. The frequent plot involvement of my family’s beloved Denver Broncos, who have never done anything wrong to a Black person ever. It all works, it all plays. But none of it so well as Maika Monroe.
L-R: Zoe Kosovic as Diem Landry and Tyriq Withers as Ledger in REMINDER OF HIM, directed by Vanessa Caswill. Photo Credit: Universal Pictures. © Universal Studios.
Monroe’s Kenna is a damaged woman blamed for the death of her lover, stripped of visitation rights to the baby that she was never allowed to hold. Anyone who has ever seen a movie before will expect a reveal that she was misunderstood and we should want her to get her child back. However, the narrative holds this reveal until even farther into Act 3 than one would expect, seemingly in order to shore up more goodwill than usual, trepidatious to reveal the truth. It whispers: cops are bad at their jobs and have little to no interest in truth and justice, grandparents are not always right, weed doesn’t work like alcohol, and our legal system has purposefully arrested millions of innocent people for consuming it in order to enrich the owners of for-profit prisons.
Maika Monroe as Kenna in REMINDER OF HIM, directed by Vanessa Caswill. Photo Credit: Michelle Faye / Universal Pictures. © Universal Studios.
Meanwhile, Kenna is the most-correct character in a “coworker cinema” film in a long-time. The most insane thing about this film is that it bends backwards through the 4th-dimension to make that clear, yet worries that small-c conservative audiences will reject her. Most of this is in the film’s obvious studio notes in the edit, and some of this is in Monroe’s performance of internalized survivor’s guilt.
Maika Monroe may yet become a movie star. Here, she deftly handles survivor’s guilt, desperate motherhood, wounded obsession, and PG-13, steamy, sexual chemistry with two very different actors, Rudy Pankow (Uncharted; Virgo) and the aforementioned Tyriq Withers. Tyriq is also very good in the film, balancing his instantly intense need to make out with Monroe with a loving, protective chemistry with Zoe Kosovic (The Smashing Machine). Kosovic gives a pretty good performance as the central daughter, Diem, but that may be because she doesn’t know what a movie is yet and Tyriq seems like a fun hang.
L-R: Maika Monroe as Kenna and Tyriq Withers as Ledger in REMINDER OF HIM, directed by Vanessa Caswill. Photo Credit: Michelle Faye / Universal Pictures. © Universal Studios.
In an era where Netflix’s careless adaptations of BookTok classics have dominated the production pipeline for films seeking a female audience, Reminders of Him is a breath of fresh air as a fun, steamy, solid drama. It tries to build new movie stars while giving aging TV stars like Bradley Whitford (The West Wing; Get Out) and especially Laruen Graham (Gilmore Girls;Twinless) a chance to remind you how good they can be. It looks good, and it is coherent if not massively sheepish in what it has to say about what it’s like to live in the world right now.
But I will say, you can’t play the too-on-the-nose-for-this-movie Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide in a bar, then have your lead say “the music here is terrible.” That’s 1.5 steps too far.
In theaters March 13th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official Universal Pictures Reminders of Him webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
Share this:
Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
Leave a Reply