I’ll confess: I walked into Vanessa Caswill’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel fully braced for manipulation, the Hallmark channel in wide-release clothing, engineered to extract tears the way theme parks extract at least a twenty every time your kid spots a stuffed animal. What I found in Reminders of Him was something more honest, even if the film doesn’t always deliver on everything it reaches for.

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As a new dad, I am not, at the moment, a man with particularly thick cinematic armor. Kenna’s struggle to claim the right to simply exist near her child hit me somewhere below the sternum. Maika Monroe plays her with an earthy, sorrowful vibrance, tough but breakable, hardened by prison without being calcified by it. She doesn’t ask us to forgive Kenna outright. She asks us to watch her try.

Set in Laramie, Wyoming, the film picks up with Kenna following a seven-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter after a crash that killed her boyfriend Scotty, the father of her daughter Diem. She returns to Laramie only to find that Scotty’s parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford) — well-meaning but full of righteous wrath — are determined to keep her daughter out of reach. There’s a moment when Kenna finally manages to be near the little girl for the first time. Diem is five and doesn’t know who this woman is. The scene is brief, and it is devastating.

Into this standoff walks Ledger Ward (Tyriq Withers), a former NFL player who owns the local bar and was Scotty’s best friend. He has spent years living across the street from the grandparents helping raise Diem as a surrogate uncle and has every reason to hate Kenna. At first he does. Withers finds the gradations in what could easily have been a simpler role, a man torn between loyalty to the dead and something unexpected pulling him toward the living, and his chemistry with Monroe holds the film together when the script wobbles.

Lainey Wilson, the Grammy-winning country singer making her acting debut, plays Amy, Kenna’s wisecracking coworker and lone champion. The highlight of the film for me, though, was Monika Myers as Lady Diana, a coworker and neighbor whose steadfast friendship with Kenna gives the film its most natural warmth and its best laughs. “She’s just so loyal. She’s going to stick up for Kenna no matter what, and no one else in the world does,” Caswill told me about the character. “She sees Kenna with this non-judgment, and it leads to humor and levity, but it comes from a place of real, deep loyalty that I love.”

The script sags in the middle and leans on contrived plotting, the kind you notice precisely because the performances are strong enough to make you wish the material matched them. Caswill, who previously directed the BBC’s Little Women, keeps the whole enterprise grounded, resisting melodrama in favor of something more restrained than the genre usually allows.

What impressed me most was her insistence that every character, even the grandparents who make Kenna’s life miserable, remain sympathetic. She told me she wanted to hold each of them with equal compassion. “I want the best for all of them, and I could see that even my desire for that had created a dilemma, because what is the best for each person? Are they all going to get the thing they most want? It was about holding them with love, but knowing that there’s not a simple answer, and trying to carry that through the story.”

That refusal to simplify stays with you after the lights come up, even when the film itself doesn’t fully rise to meet it. It understands that forgiveness is a decision, and that some debts can’t be fully settled no matter how much everyone wants them to be.

© National Review