“For you I’d bleed myself dry,” Chris Martin conjures up in the Coldplay hit “Yellow,” a form of love whose intensity alone would justify complete self-sacrifice. The song is playing on the radio as Kenna (Maika Monroe) and Scotty (Rudy Pankow) are driving home from a romantic, but not entirely sober, day at the lake. When the scene is shown as a flashback, we already know what it’s leading to: Kenna loses control of the wheel, the vehicle overturns, Scotty dies. The shock of the impact fragments the Coldplay ballad beyond recognition for a brief moment before silence sets in. Love ends before anyone can sacrifice themselves for the other.
Kenna does it anyway: She will later refrain from defending herself excessively in court and thus have a chance at a more lenient sentence. She simply couldn’t see any point in it anymore, she explains in a voiceover. As a result of the self-inflicted loss, her life was over anyway, so what does seven years in prison matter? At this point, however, Kenna has no idea that she is carrying a child.
Kenna (Maika Monroe) meets the love of her life while working at a local store – not knowing what tragedy fate has in store for her.
“Forever a part of you – Reminders of Him”, the third film adaptation of a novel by BookTok phenomenon Colleen Hoover, begins after Kenna’s release from prison – and creates a classic homecoming situation, which is often the starting point for such material. The uprooted protagonist returns to her small town to contact the daughter she gave birth to at the beginning of her prison sentence. This plan is made more difficult by the fact that Diem (Zoe Kosovic) has found a home with Scotty’s parents Patrick (Bradley Whitford) and Grace (Lauren Graham) – with whom Kenna had a rather cold relationship even before the death of her great love and who now see her as little more than the murderer of their son. Things don’t get any easier when the charming bar owner Ledger (Tyriq Withers) turns out to be Scotty’s former best friend and close confidant of his family, who also maintains a close relationship with Diem.
After “Just One More Time” became a cinema hit (accompanied by all sorts of controversy) in 2024, Colleen Hoover stories now seem to be finding their way into the cinema at a similar rate as the bestsellers of their intellectual predecessor Nicholas Sparks (“Like a Single Day”) – it was less than half a year ago that another of the author’s books, “All the Unsaid Between Us – Regretting You”, was made into a film. Basically, it is pleasing that emotional cinema – or at least a certain variety of it – has a place again in contemporary Hollywood. “Forever a part of you – Reminders Of Him” is still a disappointment.
After her return, Kenna falls in love with the bar owner Ledger (Tyriq Withers) – but does their love have a chance under these circumstances?
Hoover’s rather simple, yet direct and emotion-driven language translates less convincingly into a film format than in the more glamorous “Just One More Time” or the not exactly elegantly constructed but entertainingly condensed web of relationships “All that is unsaid between us – Regretting You”. When Kenna is initially stranded in a visibly run-down apartment complex that goes by the name “Paradise,” she soon states the obvious via voice-over: her new home is called Paradise, but it is not a paradise. Kenna’s inner monologues – taken from letters she addressed to her deceased partner – rarely add anything to the images.
The core problem of Vanessa Caswill’s second feature, who previously worked primarily in television series, is that he doesn’t know what to do with his dilemma. While it quickly becomes clear which confrontation (and which solution) the film is inevitably heading towards, “Forever a Part of You – Reminders Of Him” has to resort to obvious delaying tactics in order to fill its two hours – the book was based on changing first-person perspectives. As a result, the dramatic arrangement often stalls until a kind of deus ex machina twist readjusts the moral coordinate system again and thus loses additional potential for narrative friction.
Maika Monroe also impresses in the romantic department
Now we find ourselves in the world of a best-selling melodrama in which the staff goes by names like Kenna Rowan, Ledger Ward or Scotty Landry and the main character is given a kitten in her arms by her new landlady when she moves in. In the nameless town surrounded by mountains and forests, people still go door to door in person when looking for a job, and so Kenna is able to wrest something like provincial charm even from an environment that makes it much more difficult for her to start a new life. But even the obligatory romance doesn’t quite work out.
Maika Monroe, who has previously been known primarily from genre films such as “It Follows” or “Longlegs”, moves surprisingly confidently in this terrain – probably because the involuntary loner, whose inner damage is reflected in reserved facial expressions and clothing with subtle signs of wear, is not that far removed from her traditional role type. However, she does not find an equal counterpart in the expressive newcomer Tyriq Withers (“I know what you did last summer”), who as Ledger initially stands between the reunion of Kenna and her daughter Diem.
The music is central – but also far too irrelevant
Director Caswill also has little idea about a central motif: the use of Coldplay described at the beginning is not only one of the few genuinely cinematic ideas in “Forever a Part of You – Reminders Of Him”, it is also closely linked to Kenna’s trauma. For her, music per se has now become a trigger for feelings of guilt and experiences of loss. But the film doesn’t find an expression for how memories are linked to music and how sounds engrave themselves in one’s own experience of the world – its choice of songs is far too arbitrary for that: in Ledger’s Bar, messy blues rock versions of “Stand By Me” are played, and Noah Cyrus’s interchangeable country pop is supposed to bring catharsis at the end. It’s not all that unsympathetic – but with the next Hoover film there might be a little more courage for emotional escalation.
Conclusion: Despite a strong protagonist and an apartment complex with a super friendly kitten policy, the weakest Colleen Hoover film adaptation to date: “Forever a part of you – Reminders of Him” doesn’t budge for too long, until the central conflict resolves itself a little too easily. The romance just doesn’t really work this time either.