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 from a long stretch in prison with all the depth of a high schooler who had to miss prom because she was grounded.

All of this self-dramatizing takes a very long time, or perhaps it just seems like a long time. There’s some slight early promise in addressing the harsh realities of Kenna’s situation, getting her into a crappy apartment and a low-wage job since there aren’t exactly a lot of opportunities for ex-cons. But the focus quickly shifts to the absurdity of Ledger’s insta-crush on Kenna that he pursues relentlessly, while broadly conveying that it’s against his better judgment since he’s supposed to hate her for killing his best friend. Yet he’s forever driving his orange truck to wherever she happens to be so he can give her lifts to wherever she’s going since she hasn’t got a car. It gets to the point that you flinch whenever you see his damn popsicle-orange-colored truck pulling up next to Kenna on that same damn rural route she’s always trudging down in her damn jean-shorts-and-sexy-boots outfit.

And there’s an absurdly protracted buildup to finding out what Kenna actually did that’s so bad she’s reviled. I shouldn’t tell you this, since it’s a spoiler, but be honest — you’re not going to go see this crap anyway, are you? And it so perfectly illustrates this kind of toothless “romantic drama” that’s got nothing going on but vague sappy fantasies pumped up to hysterical soap opera levels. So here’s what actually happened:

You naturally assume Kenna and Scotty went to a bar and got wasted one night, and maybe she drove home since she was marginally less wasted than he was, and while driving recklessly somehow caused the accident that killed him. I mean, this is heartland America we’re talking about, right?

But no. During a lakeside idyll in honor of his birthday, she accepted a very small, delicate, inconsequential-looking little gummy that she tried to refuse but he pressed upon her because he didn’t want to do birthday gummies alone. Then, hours later, she was driving perfectly sensibly down an empty country road at night and hit a stone — an apparently regular-sized stone, mind you — that somehow threw their SUV off the road and down an embankment. She staggered out of the vehicle concussed and, finding Scotty unresponsive and trapped in the passenger seat of the SUV, went walking down the highway to get help and passed out somewhere along the way. Everyone assumed, based on zero evidence, that she deserted her dying boyfriend in the upside-down car and left him to his fate. Then she was arrested and tried and felt so bad she pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

In short, it’s a ridiculously contrived plot trying to have it both ways — she has to be actually guilty of very little, so as not to put off the mainstream audience while pumping up the sympathy for her when the other main characters feel justified in treating her as if she were the devil in human form.

And the plot is so thin and predictable that it has to be shamelessly padded out with long moody musical interludes featuring the repetitive use of the Coldplay song “Yellow.” There’s no uncertainty about when you should feel a surge of weepy emotion, because the music is there to tell you, in a score that’s very heavy on lugubrious soft-rock guitar stylings.

Directed by Vanessa Caswill, who’s mainly known for the BBC miniseries Thirteen and Little Women, Reminders of Him is based on one of Colleen Hoover’s twenty-plus bestsellers. She’s most famous for writing It Ends with Us, which became the hit 2024 movie adaptation starring Blake Lively, costarring and directed by Justin Baldoni. This in turn led to the sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Lively against Baldoni. He countersued for defamation, civil extortion, and invasion of privacy, but his countersuit was dismissed. The dispute is ongoing, with a trial set for mid-May.

Hoover, an executive producer on It Ends with Us who had a cameo in the film, claims to have been on the set only a few days, “completely unaware that anything was happening.” Finding the film’s current notoriety “all around sad,” she says, “I’m just trying to stay removed from the negativity.”

Having done her best to distance herself from the controversy, Hoover is also undaunted by the criticism aimed at the novel “for having an oversimplified portrayal of domestic violence.” She frequently talks about It Ends with Us in terms of its personal meaning to her family, having been based on her own mother’s experience of finding new love after an abusive relationship with Hoover’s father.

Hoover now seeks to have greater control over film adaptations of her many bestsellers. She cowrote the script to Reminders of Him with Lauren Levine (producer of Bridge to Terabithia), and they also coproduced with Gina Matthews (Isn’t it Romantic, What Women Want, 13 Going on 30). Hoover and Levine have their own production company, Heartbones Entertainment, overseeing a slate of upcoming movies based on Hoover’s novels as she seeks to replicate in the film industry her extraordinary success in the publishing world. “She’s the queen of Hollywood, with enough IP to rival Marvel,” gushes a recent profile.

My heart sinks to realize how much more Hoover-based mush is headed our way. You can judge your own level of anticipation for this tsunami of tearjerkers by reading Hoover’s own assessment of her writing:

I’m not some highbrow literary writer. I write just fun books that are easy reads. . . . It’s never been a matter of wanting to impress people with my writing skills. Sure, I could probably spend more time on a sentence and write metaphors and stuff that I don’t do. But I don’t enjoy reading that, and I want to write what I like to read. And the people that criticized that kind of writing, could they write a better book? Probably. Have they? Probably not.

It’s quite a rebuke to all of us who were interested in writing novels at some point in our lives and gave it up because, though we spent time on sentences and even used an occasional metaphor, we didn’t feel they were good enough. We left the field entirely clear to Colleen Hoover, who’s apparently now the queen of Hollywood.