Reminders of Him spends most of its runtime on a locked door. Kenna Rowan gets out of prison and wants one thing: to meet the daughter she has never held, a five-year-old being raised by the grandparents who blame Kenna for their son's death. The people keeping her out are not villains. They are grieving. That is the central difficulty of the movie, and it is why the casting matters so much. The couple who will not let a mother see her child are played by Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford, two actors America mostly knows as its warmest parents.
So here is what the search brought you, spoilers and all: yes, Kenna does get to hold Diem before the film ends. The how is quieter than any courtroom, and it comes down to a notebook.
The Wall Around Diem
Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe) is paroled six years after a car accident that killed her boyfriend, Scotty. She was convicted of vehicular manslaughter, and she gave birth to their daughter, Diem, while she was incarcerated. Diem has been raised since infancy by Scotty's parents, Grace and Patrick Landry, who built a careful, loving life around the little girl and want nothing to do with the woman they hold responsible for burying their son.
When Kenna comes back to town, every door is shut. The Landrys will not let her near Diem, and it is a family whose refusal is painfully easy to understand. The one person who does not turn away is Ledger (Tyriq Withers), the bar owner who was Scotty's best friend, and who slowly stops seeing Kenna as the villain of a story he thought he already knew. Their relationship is the film's romance, but it is also the crack in the wall.
The Notebook That Does the Work
The ending rests on one thing. Kenna cannot argue her way back into anyone's good graces, because everyone has already decided who she is. What she has instead is a journal she kept, written to Scotty, including an entry from the night he died.
When Grace discovers that Kenna and Ledger have grown close, she cuts Ledger off too. He does something better than argue back, bringing the Landrys the journal and asking them to read a single page with an open mind. Grace reads it. And what she finds changes the story she had been telling herself: Kenna did not cause the crash, and she never chose to leave Scotty behind.
This is where the casting pays off. Grace and Patrick are not written as cruel, and Graham and Whitford do not play them that way. They play two people so deep in grief that they cannot separate the woman from the worst night of their lives, until a few paragraphs make them.
How It Actually Ends
After she reads, Grace comes to the motel where Kenna is staying, returns the journal, and apologizes for never once asking to hear her side. Then she invites her to meet Diem.
The reunion is small on purpose. Kenna meets her daughter in the backyard, by a treehouse, and tells her, simply, that she is her mom and that Grace and Patrick took good care of her while she was away. She holds Diem in her lap for the first time. Patrick and Ledger make their peace nearby. A pigeon lands in the yard, a callback to an old joke between Scotty and Ledger, and the movie lets the moment sit without underlining it.
The last scene takes Kenna, Ledger, and Diem to the site of the accident, where they put back a small cross Kenna had once taken down. Her closing narration lands where the title has been pointing all along: the reminders of Scotty no longer hurt. They make her smile.
Is It Worth Watching?
Reminders of Him is the gentlest of the Colleen Hoover adaptations, and how much you like it will depend on how you feel about that. Hoover co-wrote the screenplay herself, and the film has none of the lurid melodrama that made the last few book-to-screen versions easy to mock. It is restrained, sometimes to a fault. A few critics found it wimpy, and I understand the complaint. The conflict resolves through empathy instead of fireworks, and the romance between Kenna and Ledger runs a little low on heat.
But I think the restraint is the point, and it is where Monroe is quietly excellent. She plays Kenna's grief as numbness, not tears, a woman so braced for the world to hate her that warmth barely lands. This belongs to a small run of recent movies more interested in forgiveness than payback, and if you come to it expecting a twist, there is not one. What there is instead is a story about being believed, and how rare and enormous that turns out to be. For the right mood, that is more than enough.
