‘Reminders of Him’ Isn’t Streaming Yet, But Another (and Better!) 2026 Maika Monroe Drama Is Available to Watch at Home
Where to Stream:
In Cold Light
Powered by Reelgood
Does Maika Monroe look haunted because she’s done a lot of horror films, or has she done a lot of horror films because she looks naturally haunted? It’s hard to say at this point, because she’s a Scream Queen who often appears to feel the genre down to her bones, never doing the run/shriek/get doused in blood routines out of obligation. In movies like It Follows, The Guest, and Longlegs, she undermines her sunny California-born looks with sad eyes and faraway looks. There’s an unmistakable working-class edge to that California blondness; she plays a lot of characters whose roots are showing, figuratively speaking.
That’s also what makes Monroe an unusually interesting Colleen Hoover heroine in the new movie Reminders of Him. Hoover specializes in page-turners where tragedies twist into romantic connections, and the first two big-screen adaptations of her work (both from the past 18 months) look glossy even when they’re addressing serious subjects. Reminders of Him is the third in a row to overperform box office expectations; it had a bigger opening this past weekend than the more star-studded (and confusingly similarly title) Regretting You, which itself was a sleeper hit last fall following the blockbuster It Ends with Us. Ends star Blake Lively can look haunted, too, but Monroe, playing Kenna, a woman just out of prison attempting to rebuild her life, makes her look glam by comparison. In Reminders of Him, Monroe is still beautiful, but she’s entirely convincing as a woman who wears the hell out of a Mountain Dew t-shirt because she doesn’t have a lot of outfit options, and begrudgingly accepts a kitten from her landlady at a motel-ish flophouse in lieu of having to play the electric deposit right away.
In fact, Monroe practically wills Reminders of Him into respectability. The other two Hoover movies are, if not at the melodramatic levels of Nicholas Sparks at his worst, quietly unhinged in a way that often feels alienated from basic human behavior. It will probably not surprises skeptics to learn that Hoover self-published at first; on film, her stories retain that closed-universe insularity where editors dare not tread too heavily. Reminders of Him has only remnants of this sensibility. I wonder if it’s considered Minor Hoover as a result; compared to the other two, it’s like someone told her not to try any funny business.
Photo: Michelle Faye / © Universal Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection
There are still melodramatic intersections, of course. Kenna was imprisoned for the same reason that she finds it hard to start over in her hometown: She was driving under the influence in a traffic accident that killed her boyfriend. (There are some mitigating circumstances, both in terms of why she was sentenced so harshly and why she probably didn’t deserve to be, that are revealed with far more climactic import than they deserve.) She was also pregnant with his child, subsequently gave birth in prison, and hasn’t seen the kid since. Now it’s five years later, allegedly (the child in question makes it look more like three and a half years later), and she wants to be a mother to her daughter. But the kid is in the custody of the dead boyfriend’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham), who understandably aren’t too keen on Kenna. Kenna also meets her boyfriend’s bestie Ledger (Tyriq Withers) for the first time, because he was off playing professional football when she was in the picture. What would be the most inconvenient thing for them to fall into, apart from maybe a ravine? That’s right: Love.
This is all in the trailer, and Reminders of Him ultimately can’t give you that much more that isn’t in the trailer, beyond a pretty good feel for small-town atmosphere, with Alberta capably playing Wyoming, and likable performances from Monroe and Withers that sell the story’s contrivances. The weird thing is, if you want a 2026 movie where Maika Monroe plays a hardscrabble young woman who gets out of prison and attempts to rebuild her life while getting involved in some melodramatic circumstances, all shot in the province of Alberta, there is one, and you can stream it at home (albeit for a premium VOD rental at the moment, not on a subscription service). It’s an indie movie called In Cold Light; it quietly opened in the U.S. in January, and in its native Canada just a few weeks before Reminders of Him dropped. There may have been a few Canadian multiplexes where it’s possible to double-feature them.
Photo: ©Saban Int'l/Courtesy Everett Collection
But lacking for that option, In Cold Light is worth watching at home, even if it goes in a vastly different direction from Reminders of Him. Monroe plays Ava, who does two years prison after getting busted for drug-dealing, and emerges to find her brother continuing the family business, unbeknownst to their aging rodeo worker father Will (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur), who thinks only Ava has been involved in criminal activity. She’s willing, even eager, to resume dealing, but after she’s blindsided by a horrific killing, she is forced to scramble for her life; much of the movie consists of Ava on the run from the cops and others, trying to figure out whether she can protect herself and her family. It’s a grim and concise contemporary noir thriller, with richly grainy 16mm celluloid swapped in for black-and-white.
So, not necessarily one for the if-you-liked-that-try-this shelf at the virtual video store for Reminders of Him. But the movies do play like companion pieces; watch them together, and it’s almost like you’re putting together a Sliding Doors-style vehicle for Maika Monroe, where her ex-con character is either sympathetically repentant or seething with resentment. In both of them, you can see the training that Final Girl-ing has given her, how it informs both her vulnerability and her grit. It’s considerably harder to picture any of the other Colleen Hoover Girls so far cast so believably as ex-dealer barely squirming her way out of sticky situations.
In Cold Light often does glancingly resemble a horror film, with a nightmarish situation and Monroe getting scraped and bloodied up pretty bad. Both movies harken back to the days of dependable studio programmers, when 80-minute noirs and romances were both pretty common. Now, the gulf between them is wider; Reminders of Him will make many times more money than In Cold Light, and neither will likely be as widely seen as Longlegs. But now that horror is a bigger business than ever, maybe it’s up to the Scream Queens to bring back some other neglected genres.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
Comments (0)