Vanessa Caswill directs grief with tact and romance by the book. In Reminders of Him the scenes between a mother and the daughter she cannot see are the real thing; the love story around them is not, and that is the pattern so far.
Fi1m perspective
In Reminders of Him (2026), Maika Monroe's Kenna Rowan has served her sentence and wants one thing, which is to be allowed to know her daughter. The scenes where that is in question are the best thing in the film and the clearest sign of what Caswill can do: honest, unhurried and quietly painful. They hurt more than we expected a Colleen Hoover weeper to hurt, because Caswill holds the melodrama back and lets Monroe do the work. Then the film turns to the man Kenna falls for while she waits, the plot starts running on coincidence, and Caswill lets it run.
She came to features late and from television. Short films from 2006 led to episodes of Love Matters (2013) and My Mad Fat Diary (2014), and then to Thirteen (2016), three episodes for the BBC built around Jodie Comer, which is where her reputation for tense, character-led drama was made. Little Women (2017) followed, three parts of Alcott with Maya Hawke, Emily Watson and Angela Lansbury, and then Gold Digger (2019), three episodes written by Marnie Dickens, with whom she has now worked twice. Her first feature, Love at First Sight (2023), was a romantic comedy-drama adapted from a novel. Reminders of Him is her second, and both are adaptations.
The habits are consistent. She works with women writers and producers, has put together all-female key crews on her features, and she favours restraint in material that invites the opposite. She has said, of adapting Hoover, "I treat the book as the Bible while making an adaptation," and that is both her virtue and her problem. It keeps the performances honest and the grief unforced. It also means that when the book's plotting leans on luck, the film leans with it, and nothing in Reminders of Him suggests Caswill was tempted to argue with the source. The television is where her reputation lives, and on the evidence of the one feature we have reviewed, the features have not yet caught up with it.
She has original screenplays in development, Cuck and May among them. We would like to see one of them made, if only to find out what Caswill does when there is no book to be faithful to.
Biography
Vanessa Caswill is an English director and screenwriter. She began her career with short films including A Fairytale of the City (2006), for which she also wrote the screenplay, and won the 4Talent award for Best Young Director in the UK in 2008.
Caswill has directed several BBC television productions, including the miniseries Thirteen (2016) and Little Women (2017). Her feature film credits include Love at First Sight (2023) and Reminders of Him (2026).
