If The Greatest Hits is any indication, I guess they just don’t make time-travel movies like they used to. The new romance flick, which hits Hulu today, caught the eyes of some on X (Twitter) recently, but not because its premise had people shivering in anticipation. Instead, the movie—which stars Lucy Boynton as Harriet, a would-be music producer who, after the death of her boyfriend, manifests the ability to travel back in time to key points in their relationship when she hears certain songs—worried fans who saw the promotional materials as reminiscent of High Fidelity. Not the homonymous John Cusack movie, but Hulu’s 2020 series adaptation, which the streamer prematurely canceled after only one season. Having seen the movie, I can report that The Greatest Hits bears scant resemblance to High Fidelity, but maybe that’s where it falters. Instead of exploring the worthy themes of that series—the highs and lows of dating in the modern era; how dating is complicated when you realize that you are the asshole in all of your relationships—it instead tackles something entirely different: grief … through time travel.

In order to properly air out my gripe with this otherwise enjoyable-enough movie, I have to spoil the ending. So, Harriet develops the ability to time travel after she sustains a head injury in the same car accident that kills her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet). When she hears those trigger songs I mentioned, she’s literally flung back to that moment, so she wears noise-canceling headphones all the time to avoid corporeally glitching in public. In turn, she plays specific songs when she wants to relive the past, particularly in the hopes that she can save her boyfriend by convincing him to make a different turn or pull the car over before the accident. After two years of this, still unable to save her boyfriend, and still very much in the wakes-up-on-the-couch-next-to-an-open-bottle-of-Jameson stage of Movie Grief™, Harriet connects with David (Justin H. Min) after meeting him in a grief support group. Though I’m pretty sure the cardinal rule is you’re not supposed to date anyone you meet in therapy, Min is serving such adorable puppy-dog energy that I won’t argue. But it’s no surprise that Harriet’s habit of quite literally reminiscing with her dead boyfriend sorta mucks up her budding relationship with her alive one.

What I will argue with, however, is how it all resolves. Making the choice to move on and be happy would have been the normal and correct ending to a plot like this—“You need to stop living in the past,” etc., etc.  But Harriet does not choose to give up her fight to save Max, and therefore solve her time traveling problem. No, once Harriet realizes she can only change what she does in the past and not the actions of anyone else, she instead decides to travel back in time to the moment where she meets Max and to not initiate any romantic relationship with him. She just … magicks it away and makes it so that Harriet + Max (Marriet?) never happened.

Of course, if she doesn’t meet Max, they don’t get into the accident, and she doesn’t get the head trauma that causes her to time travel. But, she also doesn’t have a reason for ending up in group therapy, and so she also doesn’t meet David. Essentially, she retcons both of the loves of her life so people can stop ironically calling her “Headphones.”

I don’t think this would be so offensive to me if finding a solution to the musical time traveling wasn’t expressly framed as a lesson about grief. When the group’s moderating therapist, Dr. Bartlett (Retta, of “Treat yo self” fame), pulls Harriet aside in the beginning of the film, she tells Harriet that “it’s not just about the music,” that instead, Harriet is “making a conscious choice to hide out” in her grief. Harriet’s effervescent best friend, Morris (Austin Crute), when they’re not parroting overwritten lines like “You lost yourself when you lost him,” is encouraging Harriet to “live baby, live” and move on. Morris cautions Harriet against “pissing away” her “life and talent,” encourages her to “accept reality,” and, when Harriet dismisses Morris’ pleas, quips: “To say I’m concerned about you is such an understatement.” The message of the film is clear: Harriet needs to solve her issues with grief, which would solve her time traveling issue, and allow her to live a fruitful life in the present. However, there’s an added layer to all this preaching about healing that suggests there’s some big takeaway here, that we’re supposed to be learning something profound about how to navigate grief in the real world. And what it offers is … excise the source of your grief from the whole entire timeline?

Look, I get that Greatest Hits is just a quick, mostly fine rom-com! And, like someone reminded me when I was complaining about this: Not every movie is a lesson. But this one seems like, maybe, it wants to be. And I take my rom-com watching seriously, as should you all! Beyond the fact that throwing David out with the Max bathwater is an entirely too convenient way to resolve the plot, this conclusion is not healthy! The lesson being taught here, at least the one Harriet seems to learn, is that it’s best to just pretend it all never happened?! Harriet, my girl, I don’t think that’s what your therapist meant when she warned against “hiding out” in your grief. In fact, what the few therapy sessions in the movie show is that the beauty of a relationship, of all the things that you learned about yourself while being coupled with someone else in one of the most important developmental stages of your life, is integral to who you are. Does Harriet truly believe that she’s better off not going through it? Must I get on my knees, shake my fists to the heavens, and call out, “Dear lord, was there no other way to seemingly fix this little quirk of quantum physics?!”

Of course, you might have guessed that in the end, the movie was still going to find a way to have Harriet and David meet each other again after the Temporal Culling—but then, she’s not the same person he really took to liking at the start, is she? Personally, I love time-travel tales. And we all know the cardinal rule of a good time-travel story is that it’s supposed to make you appreciate your current situation more than you did before you started traversing the space-time continuum! It may be beyond me, but I don’t think that avoiding any issue entirely, working around something instead of through, and magicking problems away is dramatically interesting or a good lesson to impart. Processing it, going through it, may sound cliché, but it also sounds much healthier. And it wouldn’t have left me wishing I could get my time back.