It Ends with Us (2024)
Director: Justin Baldoni
Screenwriter: Christy Hall
Starring: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Brandon Sklenar
BookTok, a literary-focused subcommunity on the popular and controversial app TikTok, exploded online in early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning to sweep the globe. Born out of a need to escape the frightening reality we found ourselves in, and a desire to quell the loneliness and isolation that came from mandatory lockdowns and social distancing, BookTok became a space for users to share in a love of reading, for creators to offer book recommendations and publish reviews, and for writers to connect with potential readers. Although the community certainly has its detractors, having been criticised for its tendency to value marketability over style and substance, BookTok has undoubtedly had a tremendous impact on book sales and the publishing industry at large, directly influencing the kinds of stories publishers have come to see as commercially viable.
Hollywood has certainly taken notice of BookTok’s ability to get people to spend money. ‘Red White and Royal Blue’ by Casey McQuiston, which continues to be insanely popular on the app, was adapted to the screen by Amazon Prime Video just last year. Currently, there are at least five Emily Henry romance novel film adaptations in the works, all of which are heavily promoted and featured on BookTok. But it is the big screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel “It Ends with Us” that is perhaps the most anticipated and most controversial one of all. The book, a romance novel focusing on generational trauma and domestic abuse, saw a resurgence in popularity online in 2021, and that exposure has done wonders for Hoover’s career, with many referring to the author as ‘The Queen of BookTok.’
Directed by Justin Baldoni (Five Feet Apart) with a script by Christy Hall, It Ends with Us is a vast improvement over its source material; a stylish melodrama that is carried by strong and vulnerable performances from its entire cast. Although the film has more than a few weak points, It Ends with Us handles its dark and heavy themes with sensitivity and care, and is a surprisingly moving portrait of how difficult it is to break the cycle of abuse.
It Ends with Us begins with Blake Lively’s Lily Blossom Bloom – yes, that is her actual legal name – returning home to speak at her father’s funeral. Although her mother, Jenny (Amy Morton), tells her she has to say just five things she loved about her father, Lily flees the funeral without saying anything at all. Our heroine then finds herself on a rooftop in Boston, where she recently moved to start anew and open her own flower shop. While sitting on the edge of the roof overlooking the city, Lily meets Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), a neurosurgeon who furiously kicks a deck chair before explaining to Lily that he lost a patient earlier that night. The two hit it off immediately, their sexual chemistry evident, but Ryle only does one night stands and Lily only does committed relationships, so they part ways. They soon cross paths again when it is revealed that Ryle is the brother of Lily’s new employee Allysa (Jenny Slate). Despite attempts to remain just friends, Ryle and Lily soon embark on a passionate romance that appears picture-perfect on the surface but slowly begins to unravel and is further strained when Lily reconnects with her first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar).
It Ends with Us is by no means the first film based on a viral literary sensation. The Fifty Shades of Grey and After films were also both adapted from novels that first became phenomena online, mostly due to the fact that both of them started off as fan fiction. “It Ends with Us” occupies a similar space within the discourse, as a novel that is easily digested but whose questionable quality is overshadowed by its immense popularity. Novelist Hoover has often been criticized for her handling of dark subject material as well as her overall messaging when it comes to abusive behavior. The film version of It Ends with Us smartly avoids this problem by smoothing out a lot of the more cringeworthy aspects of Hoover’s novel, including the fact that the flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years are told in the form of letters that teenage Lily (Isabela Ferrer in her screen debut) wrote to Ellen DeGeneres. These flashback scenes create an awkward pacing, given that there’s never a good enough narrative reason for them to be placed where they are in the script, but the scenes work to give context to Lily and Atlas’s (Alex Neustaedter) relationship and they are well acted.
The film is at least somewhat about abuse, but it fails to draw a clear enough parallel between the abuse Lily experiences from her father (Kevin McKidd) and the abuse she suffers at the hands of her partner, Ryle. Perhaps the message here is that it is easy to see things clearly from the outside, but much harder when it’s happening directly to you? The film’s throughline of generational trauma is weakened by the fact it never fully explores the abuse Lily’s mother endured (often neglecting the talents of Amy Morton) in favor of explaining away the reasons men abuse women.
The film’s strength lies in what it is able to accomplish in terms of turning Lily into a much more unreliable narrator than she is in the novel. The color palette in the beginning of the film (warm pinks and deep oranges) evokes the coziness of a Fall rom-com ala When Harry Met Sally. But, like deceptive melodramas of the past, like Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, the film purposefully offers us a false sense of security before pulling the rug out from under us. Director Justin Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall use Ryle and Lily’s cliché meet-cute to show how easy it is to be swept up into an abusive relationship without even realizing it – to explain away all of the red flags. The casting of Baldoni as Ryle is incredibly effective in this way. He’s charming and conventionally attractive, with a chiselled body that is used as a distraction from his questionable behavior. The film rightly spends almost the entire first half of its runtime developing Ryle and Lily’s relationship, getting us invested in their love story, before having to slowly come to terms with the fact that it is actually toxic. Baldoni’s direction is deeply intimate, framing his actors mostly in close ups and focusing on the minute details of their facial expressions and how they inhabit the space around each other. Both Baldoni and Lively play off each other believably, and their more volatile interactions are genuinely frightening and disturbing to witness, although the film’s PG-13 rating greatly restricts its ability to portray the violent, ugly reality of living with an abuser.
As the central character, Lively’s subtle inner strength shines through in the film’s final moments, but that is not enough to imbue Lily with the layers needed to feel like a real person. Her responses to Ryle’s abuse, as she desperately tries to keep him from hurting her, are incredibly visceral, but Lively’s performance would have benefitted from being given more material to explore. By sticking so closely to the novel in this respect, the film fails to fully flesh out its main character and relies too heavily on elements of the novel that feel painfully outdated, especially when it comes to women’s rights in relation to pregnancy and abortion.
Supporting players Jenny Slate and Hasan Minhaj each provide moments of lightness and laughter that work to balance the darker aspects of the film without taking away from them, while Brandon Sklenar is rightly calm and understated as the adult version of Atlas, providing a stabilizing presence for both Lily and for us as an audience. Sklenar and Lively do well to create an entirely different chemistry than Lively has with Baldoni, and it somehow makes the love triangle work despite how Atlas’s screentime is relatively limited.
It Ends with Us is a glossy melodrama that is, at times, weakened by its source material, and never quite figures out what it wants to say about the men who are abusers and the women who suffer because of them; it’s a tear jerker, and somehow manages to find a sliver of emotional truth at its core. It makes you care, and when compared to the IP-driven slop and hollow nostalgia we’ve been fed in recent years, even that is a feat worth celebrating.
Score: 14/24
