‘Regretting You’ comes from the same Colleen Hoover source material as ‘It Ends With Us’ – and it plays like a modern melodrama with shades of 1950s domestic tragedy, almost ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ by way of a YA Nicholas Sparks sensibility.

It’s compulsively watchable because of how audacious the central premise is. After a tragic accident wipes out two members of one family, those left behind discover that the two who died may actually have been having an affair – and may even have conceived a child being raised by the wrong father. And that revelation becomes the catalyst for the two surviving partners to finally recognize that they were the ones who should have been together all along.

It leans heavily into the idea that people can spend years, even decades, with the wrong person out of duty, expectation and fear of breaking the mould. There is something very emotionally recognisable here: people sacrificing their authentic selves for what looks like the ‘right’ life from the outside.

Mother/daughter bonding sits at the emotional core, as both try to process grief, betrayal, guilt, anger and the shattering of everything they’ve assumed is stable and true. Yes, it’s heightened, it’s very much Schmaltz dialled to 11, but it also understands the messy reality that when children are involved you don’t just reshuffle lives and start again.

But narratively the film essentially sweeps aside the two impediments (the deceased spouses) to allow the true couple to emerge – which makes the plotting feel convenient, even contrived. And like many of these Hoover adaptations, there’s quite a bit of obvious product placement which slightly cheapens the emotional sincerity.

Still, as glossy melodrama, it does work. It taps into that uneasy truth that sometimes the people we end up with are not the ones we were meant to be with… and life only forces us to confront that once it’s already too late.