It Ends With Us
"What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it's okay because really it was just an accident?" Questions like this are at the heart of "It Ends with Us," based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover . This is a message picture about what it takes to break the vicious cycle of domestic violence. It is not subtle.
After the emotional turmoil of her estranged father's funeral in Maine, our heroine, the impeccably fashionable Lily Bloom ( Blake Lively , the best clotheshorse movie star since Kay Francis), breaks into a rooftop to peer at the vast beauty of Boston's skyline. Before she can do much introspection, she meets the impossibly handsome and impossibly named Ryle Kincaid ( Justin Baldoni , also the film's director), a neurosurgeon (naturally). Baldoni comes barreling into the scene like a hurricane, hurling a pair of steel chairs across the rooftop in anger. Instead of repulsion from this violent act, Lily finds herself intrigued and drawn to his charm and megawatt smile. Their playful patter, peppered with barbs veiled as flirtation from Ryle, ramps up until the dashing surgeon is summoned back to the hospital by his beeper.
This is of course not the last we see of Ryle. He just happens to be the brother of Allysa ( Jenny Slate ), the quirky rich and bored housewife Lily hires to help her run the Cottagecore florist shop of her dreams. Although Lily repeatedly insists that she just wants to be friends, Ryle pursues her, ignoring her many pleas just as flagrantly as she ignores all his red flags. Lust is a hell of a drug.
Quickly, Ryle's negs and flirtatious barbs ramp up, transforming into toxic jealousy and other forms of obsessive behavior. This includes inviting himself to dinner with her mother by dropping the L-word for the first time, one of several such instances of emotional manipulation he brandishes like a silver-tipped dagger. Before she knows it, Lily is not only in a relationship she didn't really want, she herself becomes an outlet for Ryle's raging temper.
The early scenes of Lily and Ryle's volatile courtship are interwoven with scenes in which teenage Lily ( Isabela Ferrer ) falls in love for the first time with a schoolmate named Atlas ( Alex Neustaedter ). The soulful boy is squatting in the abandoned house across the street from hers, fleeing his mother's abusive boyfriend. The generous and nonjudgmental Lily offers both aid and friendship when Atlas needs it the most. He in turn offers her a caring shoulder and a safe place to finally express the fear she feels as she watches her father physically abuse her own mother over and over again.
These scenes are innocent and tender, the two young actors imbuing the teenagers with just the right balance of world weariness from the violence they've already endured and the irrepressible hope that comes with youth. Yet, Baldoni and his team of editors ( Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan ) can't quite find the right balance between these scenes and the more erotic and violent scenes featuring Baldoni and Lively. However, once Brandon Sklenar (doing his best Harry Connick, Jr. in " Hope Floats ") enters as the grown-up Atlas, he is able to craft an effortless, natural chemistry with Lively that is nearly as strong as these early moments, although they both are far too fleeting.
This story of love, trauma and abuse is wrapped up in the same amber-hued autumnal glow of Lively's bestie Taylor Swift 's short film for her autobiographical song "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)," which itself is about an abusive relationship. Lily even has the same tousled strawberry blonde tresses as the short film's star Sadie Sink . So naturally, the film's most climatic moment of domestic abuse, like the short, takes place in the couple's kitchen. Later, the moment where Lily comes into her own power as she attempts to rebuild her life is underscored by Swift's "My Tears Ricochet" (which perhaps counts as a spoiler if you know the topic of the song. Swifties, I'm sorry.)
"It Ends with Us" is a fine-looking picture. Baldoni and cinematographer Barry Peterson know how to frame movie star faces in flattering medium close-ups, allowing every nuanced emotion, every twinkle in their eyes to transport the viewers on this emotional journey with them, even when the characters feel more like didactic cyphers than fully-realized human beings. Lily's flower shop (which never seems to have any customers) is a Pinterest board brought to life. And Lively's designer duds are nearly as showstopping as the ones she sports in " A Simple Favor ."
Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her. I kept thinking of " Alice, Darling ," Mary Nighy's incredible film about intimate partner violence from a few years back in which Anna Kendrick finds herself suffocating in a psychologically abusive relationship. In that film, Kendrick's character is given a full life and a group of friends who help her overcome the codependent trap she's been caged in. Here, the few women in Lily's life – her so-called best friend Allysa and her mother Jenny ( Amy Morton ) – are underdeveloped, relegated to a handful of scenes that largely exist as plot points.
The PG-13 rating keeps the violence Ryle inflicts on Lily, or her father's violence in the flashbacks, to a minimum visually (and often seen in slow motion or in choppy montages), Christy Hall 's script unfortunately often falls into "as the father of daughters" territory, giving more care to explaining why these men are the way they are (especially in Ryle's case, in the film's most cringe-worthy twist) than it does to the psychology – let alone the economics – of why women often stay with abusive partners. Instead, this subject, which should really be the key to the whole story, is covered in one very short scene between Lily and her mother. The forced love triangle once Atlas re-enters Lily's adult life also restricts things, causing Lily's life to once again orbit mostly around the men in it.
"It Ends with Us" is certainly not a bad film. At times, it's actually quite good and its central message is crafted with intention and care. I just wish it had a sharper focus on Lily's interiority, her life beyond her trauma, and who she really is in relation to herself, and herself alone.
Marya E. Gates
Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture.
It Ends with Us
- Blake Lively as Lily Bloom
- Justin Baldoni as Ryle Kincaid
- Brandon Sklenar as Atlas Corrigan
- Jenny Slate as Allysa
- Hasan Minhaj as Marshall
- Christy Hall
- Justin Baldoni
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‘it ends with us’: what the critics are saying.
The film, directed by Justin Baldoni, who also stars opposite Blake Lively, hits theaters Friday.
By Carly Thomas
Carly Thomas
Associate Editor
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Following the New York premiere of It Ends With Us on Tuesday evening, the first reviews of the film from critics have been coming in, and they’ve been decidedly mixed.
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The film has previously faced criticism for its depiction of domestic violence, with some fans claiming it romanticizes the subject. However, a common theme among the early reviews is that while the movie adaptation manages to treat the topic of domestic violence with care, the narrative appears to suffer.
As of Wednesday evening, It Ends With Us had a score of 60 percent from 44 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and clocked in at 52 percent on Metacritic from 21 reviews.
The film, from Sony Pictures, hits theaters Friday . It also stars Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Isabela Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter.
Read on for key excerpts from some of the most prominent early reviews following the premiere of It Ends With Us .
The Hollywood Reporter ‘s arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review , “The pat treatment of these characters ultimately does a disservice to the broader themes embedded in It Ends With Us . Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.”
The Guardian ‘s Benjamin Lee wrote , “It’s a plot of hackneyed soap tropes but there’s a real maturity to how it unfolds, a story of abuse that’s far less obvious than we’ve grown accustomed to, the details far knottier than some might be comfortable with. There are expected cliches but there are also many that are mercifully avoided too, the story not always conforming to type.
“ It Ends With Us savors the trappings of a glossy love triangle: the banter, the flirting, the turbulence, the extravagant costumes,” Amy Nicholson of The Washington Post wrote. “The movie has to cheat a bit to get at the complexity of Hoover’s book. A child of domestic abuse, Hoover writes with painful intimacy about Lily’s struggle to claw free from her past. Baldoni shifts some of that turmoil to the audience, with editors Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan cutting key scenes so that, like Lily, we don’t know what to believe.”
Nicholson added that “even bouncing off male leads who are more pinball bumpers than dimensional characters,” Lively gave a “great performance as a headstrong, sensible woman who struggles to consider herself a victim.”
Critic Mark Kennedy wrote in his review for The Associated Press that “the uneven movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling 2016 novel” tries to “balance the realities of domestic violence inside a rom-com and a female-empowerment movie. All suffer in the process.
“It veers too close to melodrama, with suicide, homelessness, generational trauma, child murder, unintended pregnancy and never-forgotten love all touched on and only half digested,” Kennedy continued. “Set in Boston, it never even pulls from that city’s flavor.”
“The problem, maybe, is that It Ends With Us is all about what it’s about, and nothing more,” she added. “These characters exist to make points about the insidiousness of domestic violence, the way its effects can creep up invisibly even as those who are suffering cloak themselves in protective denial. Admittedly, that’s a lot for a movie to carry. But movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving.”
Proma Khosla wrote for IndieWire that the film “manages to sensitively handle its delicate subject matter, though largely at the cost of a more intricate narrative.
“ It Ends With Us does what it wants to (and what made Hoover’s book such a smash hit), highlighting the patterns of abuse, trauma, and silence at play in this specific story,” Khosla added in her review. “Baldoni and Hall handle Lily and everyone around her with empathy, downplaying unpleasantness or oversimplifying story elements ultimately to mitigate risk and protect viewers — with the opportunity to dig deeper in a potential sequel.”
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- User reviews
It Ends with Us
When a woman's first love suddenly reenters her life, her relationship with a charming, but abusive neurosurgeon is upended and she realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to mak... Read all When a woman's first love suddenly reenters her life, her relationship with a charming, but abusive neurosurgeon is upended and she realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to make an impossible choice for her future. When a woman's first love suddenly reenters her life, her relationship with a charming, but abusive neurosurgeon is upended and she realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to make an impossible choice for her future.
- Justin Baldoni
- Christy Hall
- Colleen Hoover
- Blake Lively
- Jenny Slate
- 384 User reviews
- 124 Critic reviews
- 53 Metascore
- 1 nomination
Top cast 25
- Ryle Kincaid
- Atlas Corrigan
- Andrew Bloom
- Jenny Bloom
- Young Atlas Corrigan
- Young Lily Bloom
- Doctor Johnson
- Doctor Julie
- Doctor Dunbar
- (as Megan Elyse Robinson)
- Female Waiter
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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Did you know
- Trivia The casting of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni as Lily and Ryle caused backlash from fans because in the book Lily is 23 and Ryle is 30, while Lively is 35 and Baldoni is 39. Author of the book Colleen Hoover explained in an interview that she wanted to age the characters up in the movie in an effort to correct a mistake she made in the book. She said, "Back when I wrote It Ends With Us, the new adult [genre] was very popular. You were writing college-age characters. That's what I was contracted to do. I made Lily very young. I didn't know that neurosurgeons went to school for 6-12 years. There's not a 20-something neurosurgeon. As I started making this movie, I'm like, 'We need to age them out, because I messed up.' So, that's my fault."
- Goofs When Lily is in the hospital after she has been bitten, when they first show the tattoo and the bite area you can see x's where the bite marks are supposed to be where they missed a frame of CGI.
- Connections Featured in The Project: Episode dated 6 August 2024 (2024)
- Soundtracks Strangers Written by Ethel Cain (as Hayden Anhedonia) Performed by Ethel Cain Courtesy of Daughters of Cain Records By arrangement with AWAL Recordings America, Inc.
User reviews 384
Great message and visuals. but story telling falls flat..
- yasmeenmihyar
- Aug 9, 2024
- How long is It Ends with Us? Powered by Alexa
- August 9, 2024 (United States)
- United States
- Romper El Círculo
- Plainfield, New Jersey, USA
- Wayfarer Studios
- Saks Picture Company
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $25,000,000 (estimated)
- $148,518,266
- $50,016,652
- Aug 11, 2024
- $349,283,938
- Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
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