it ends with us movie reviews

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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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘It Ends with Us’ on Netflix, a Wildly Veering Romantic Melodrama That Blake Lively Keeps on the Road

Where to stream:.

• It Ends With Us
• Blake Lively

Blake Lively Sues ‘It Ends With Us’ Director And Costar Justin Baldoni For Sexual Harassment

Can the netflix thriller ‘carry-on’ take taron egerton’s career to the next level, blake lively’s embattled romance ‘it ends with us’ sets netflix premiere date, anne hathaway fans slam her latest role in colleen hoover adaptation of ‘verity’: “this isn’t you”.

It’s no surprise that It Ends with Us (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ) was a smash hit: It stars Blake Lively, who’s Taylor Swift-adjacent enough to be considered a superstar these days. It’s based on a 2016 romance novel by BookTok superstar Colleen Hoover that was a bestseller in 2023 (alongside its sequel, It Starts with Us ); in 2022, her books, notably loaded with unintentionally hilarious prose, outsold the Bible itself. And it helps that Lively and her hubs, Deadpool and Wolverine star Ryan Reynolds, shared the top of the box office charts for a while, landing both films plenty of extra headlines (feels like an opportunity for another Barbenheimer phenomenon was missed – it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it coulda been It Endpools with Wolverinus). I’ve always contended that Lively is an underrated actor with a distinctly bittersweet presence, but is it enough to lift this flimsy fic-lit adaptation above the many movies based on work by similarly shitty writers like Stephanie Meyer, EL James and Nicholas Sparks?

IT ENDS WITH US : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Her name is Lily Blossom Bloom (Lively), and for that, her parents might need to be flogged. (Or at least the real-life novelist who came up with it.) Said parents were a complication beyond that – her father, the mayor of the fictional burg of Plethora, Maine, routinely beat up her mother Jenny (Amy Morton), who stayed with the guy until he died. And now, Lily steps to the podium to eulogize her father with a list of things she loved about him most. Her notes are blank. She walks out and returns to Boston and heads up to the roof of a building with a gorgeous view of the skyline so she can grieve. And just as she’s Contemplating Things, a handsome and chiseled man bursts through the door and curses and kicks a chair. We seem to be atop Bad Day Towers.

But this guy. He’s Ryle Kincaid a neurosurgeon, who says things like, “I’m a ripped neurosurgeon,” possibly because he’s played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni. Yes. This is utterly ridiculous, but at least the dialogue acknowledges its own ridiculousness, right? Right? Right? Cough . Sure. Lily and Ryle share “naked truths” about how she’s mourning her father and how he couldn’t save a kid on the operating table. As extremely attractive people in movies inevitably do, they flirt. Then he says something that would get a Hallmark copywriter demoted to the blank-card division: “I want to have sex with you.” He’s not at all ashamed to admit to being a lust guy, not a love guy. How she doesn’t immediately rip off her clothes and let him ravage her like a lovestruck waif, I don’t know. But she resists, and he gets a call for an emergency surgery to go, um, surgure, so that’s that, and she gets about opening up her new flower shop. Yes. Lily Bloom’s Flower Shop. Because Lily Blossom Bloom’s Flower Shop would be overkill.

Lily’s cleaning up the cutest filthy retail space in all of greater Boston when Allysa (Jenny Slate) wanders in, asking for a job. They hit it off and become besties, and now we have some Slate comic relief to balance Lively’s lovely melancholy. But guess who just so happens to be Allysa’s brother? Ryle, of course. DESTINY IS AFOOT. Or is it just the screenwriter gods? And so Ryle and Lily get on with dating and sexing each other. Meanwhile, we get flashbacks to Lily as a teenager (Isabela Ferrer, a startling dead-ringer for Lively), who despaired at her father’s cruelty and fell in love with and lost her virginity to a homeless classmate, Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), who ran away from his troubled home life to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Destiny afoots itself even further when Lily goes out to dinner and who waits on her but the adult Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), who owns the restaurant and that crossover-country-singer haircut.

Back in the present day, Ryle curbs his caddishness long enough to fall really in serious and true love with Lily, and she with him. How serious is he? “Serious as an aneurysm,” says the neurosurgeon. But about here is when I have to curb the snark and get serious myself, because there’s an incident in which Ryle seems to accidentally smack Lily in the face, but how much of an accident is it, really? Then there’s an incident in which Ryle and Lily eat out at Atlas’ restaurant and some lids get ripped off: Atlas puts two and two together and accuses Ryle of beating on Lily, and then Ryle realizes Atlas is Lily’s long-lost past love. Cue the fisticuffs – and the official love triangle. Has Ryle’s true nature begun to emerge? And is there lingering affection between Lily and the sincere and forthright Atlas? The plot, as they say, thicks.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Where similar romantic melodramas like Nicholas Sparks adaptations ( Dear John , The Last Song , A Walk to Remember , etc.) and Remember Me are clunk city, Lively is a boon to It Ends with Us . She works to elevate mediocre material like she did with The Age of Adaline .

Performance Worth Watching: That said, even Lively struggles to make this hamfisted stuff 100 percent palatable. Her wry smile, heartburstingly sad eyes and airy-but-never-insubstantial presence work overtime in an attempt to make an uncomplicated character a little more beefy. You can’t help but appreciate the effort.

Memorable Dialogue: Was this lifted straight from Hoover’s wretched prose?

Lily, looking out at the Boston skyline: You have a really nice view. Ryle, looking at Lily: I do .

Sex and Skin: Lingerie’d Lively, shirtless Baldoni, some medium-steamy sex sessions that don’t really test the film’s PG-13 rating.

Our Take: For its first half, It Ends with Us works as a gentle romance about a woman leading her life with quiet confidence while wrestling with past trauma, and it’s charming if you choose to give Ryle and his red flags the benefit of the doubt. The second half, however, is significantly more soapy, its boiled-over melodrama lurching awkwardly away from the subtler material preceding it. Lively is the leavening agent of this story, and she works hard to sell sell sell it, which sounds awkward on paper, but is significantly less so thanks to her presence, which fills the screen with warmth. There’s no debating Lily as a sympathetic protagonist, Lively transcending the screenplay’s slapdash rendering of the character. Think of it like song lyrics that are corny when read, but come alive when sung with emotion.

Are Blake Lively And Justin Baldoni Beefing? Breaking Down The ‘It Ends With Us’ Drama Rumors

Yet it may be difficult to come to terms with the film’s miscalculated blend of deep silliness and deep seriousness: A series of hackneyed only-in-the-movies kismetic coincidences lead to a set of circumstances that flirt with The Burning Bed -style histrionics, leaving us to imagine the extreme whiplash we’d feel without Lively’s tone-setting work. That said, Baldoni and Lively ( who reportedly clashed during filming ) execute the more harrowing dramatic scenes with enough conviction to respect the seriousness of the subject matter, and the film’s depiction of its domestic abuser is knotty and complicated instead of morally simplistic. Whether you can deal with this rocky, uneven dramatic terrain is the question. 

Our Call:   It Ends with Us is a mess, but a fairly watchable one. STREAM IT to appreciate Lively’s efforts.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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It Ends With Us Reviews

The film is a tonal mess, mostly presented as a romantic comedy, although it’s really almost entirely about domestic violence

Full Review | Dec 12, 2024

It’s rom-com meets trauma porn, deafeningly emotive in a way that for some will be too much and for others precisely what they are looking for.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 10, 2024

Whatever your issues with the source material, Hoover at least tried to dig into the generational cycle of abuse. Baldoni wants to couch all that in rom-com trappings, diluting the impact and ending up with something more mawkish than moving.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 20, 2024

…the violence done by men to women is such an omnipresent element of today’s daily news cycle that it usually goes uncommented on; IEWU puts these elements front and centre, and that fresh, fearless content seems to be what audiences want to see in droves

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2024

Rich in character and incident, but tonal inconsistencies and some narrative fudging blunt its overall impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 9, 2024

The film appears well-intentioned, but it’s inability to keep its focus on Lily, to center her journey absent the will-they-won’t-they rom-com elements, and to present the film with a coding of danger, makes the experience a vapid one ... .

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 8, 2024

It Ends with Us has an important message about domestic violence that it wants to get across, but sadly it ends up getting clumsily handled in a story that's buried under a pile of cliches & extreme coincidences.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 4, 2024

Weaknesses aside, there is a good movie within the faltering framework. Some scenes have believable strengths because Baldoni is a superb director. Even with a cluttered screenplay, he knows how to tell a story that holds your interest as well as it does.

Full Review | Oct 10, 2024

Based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller, Blake Lively’s ‘It Ends With Us’ is a tale of love, grief, abuse and rage that’s oddly disengaging

Full Review | Oct 4, 2024

It Ends with Us is a mess, but a fairly watchable one.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2024

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2024

This smart and sensitive movie version will more than satisfy the millions who’ve picked it up and found a bible of sorts for abuse survivors.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2024

The film’s theme of how abuse occurs in generational cycles is noteworthy as we see Lily’s stalwart goal of breaking that cycle--excellent messages about the topic of physical abuse and self-worth.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2024

The plot... along with the co-mingled romantic comedy tropes, [date] and [cheapen] the film drastically, despite the care it brings to its more sensitive elements.

Full Review | Sep 7, 2024

It’s an unapologetic melodrama through and through, fully aware that we do still go to the movies to watch impossibly gorgeous people existing well behind their means living ordinary lives with relatable problems.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Sep 5, 2024

This melodrama on spousal assault forgoes psychological and character complexities for congenial viewing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 4, 2024

After more than two hours, It Ends With Us gets to [Lily's] self-actualization, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that it could have gotten there much faster and more meaningfully.

Full Review | Sep 2, 2024

Until a crucial confrontation scene, “It Ends With Us” suggests too many outs for comfort. Lively doesn’t reveal the most important stories in her life and ends up reliving them. Baldoni’s character keeps his cards close to the vest, too.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 30, 2024

Those looking for a genre-redefining cinematic masterpiece or expecting a line-by-line remake will leave the theater disappointed. But those searching for a good enough drama with a few standout performances will get their money’s worth...

Full Review | Aug 30, 2024

A well-acted, though somewhat overlong romantic drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2024

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‘It Ends With Us’ Review: Love Hurts, and Sometimes Bruises

Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a flower lover with a thorny personal garden, in this gauzy adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel.

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By Manohla Dargis

Buried under the gauzy romanticism of “It Ends With Us” — under the softly diffused visuals, the endless montage sequences, the sensitive mewling on the soundtrack and the luxuriously coifed thickets of Blake Lively ’s sunset-on-Malibu-Beach dyed-red hair — is a tough little movie about women, bad choices, worse men and decisions that doesn’t fit into a tidy box.

Lively stars as the improbably named Lily Blossom Bloom, a beauty with a traumatic history, a soulful ex and a passion for gardening. Over the course of the movie, she falls in love with a neurosurgeon who looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. She also befriends a wisecracking sidekick, opens a whimsical floral shop, endures heartache and, after much reflection and many plot complications, finds herself. It’s hard going, but Lily takes whatever life throws at her with her meticulously styled head up and a neo-bohemian influencer vibe. She’s a dream of a woman, an aspirational ideal, an Instagram-era Mildred Pierce.

You may know Mildred from Turner Classic Movies as the pie-baking survivor played by Joan Crawford in the 1945 noir “ Mildred Pierce .” Mildred walks into that classic wearing a mink coat with linebacker shoulder-pads and the kind of stricken look that clouds a woman’s face when she discovers that her no-good second husband is sleeping with her no-good teenage daughter, and the brat has just offed the creep. It’s no wonder that when Mildred stares into the nighttime waters of the Pacific, she seems to be mulling her equally dark past and future, much as Lily does one evening on a Boston rooftop early on in “It Ends With Us.”

Lily doesn’t have long to consider her existential options because her rooftop reveries are soon interrupted by the neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who directed the movie). A brooding hunk with soft eyes, hard muscles and miraculously unchanging three-day stubble, Ryle has a touch of menace and a gift for cornball lines, and before long he and Lily are flirtatiously circling each other. Love buds and, yes, blooms, and Lily settles down with Ryle. He seems like a ready-made catch (Baldoni gives himself plenty of close-ups), although anyone at all familiar with the conventions of romantic fiction will wonder about the intensity of his attentions. A picture-perfect guy doesn’t necessarily make a picture-perfect life, dig?

Adapted from Colleen Hoover ’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long. It’s visually and narratively overbusy, stuffed with flashbacks of Lily as an adolescent (Isabela Ferrer) that create two parallel lines of action. As the adult Lily moves forward with Ryle and opens her store — she gets help from a nattering assistant, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who enters with her luxury bag swinging and motormouth running — images of the past fill in Lily’s history and her high-school romance with another student, Atlas. (Alex Neustaedter plays him as a teen, while Brandon Sklenar steps into the grown-up role.)

Even the kitschiest romances have a way of sinking their hooks into you, and so it is here, at least intermittently. Love stories work on us because love does, with the bonus that watching beautiful people suffer beautifully is a reason movies were invented. Lively is eminently suited to this task and has some strong moments, but she’s often ill-served by the filmmaking. The flashbacks add information, yet they also pull you away from the adult Lily, which fragments Lively’s performance and drains the slow-building momentum of her scenes. Just as unfortunately, Baldoni prettifies everything — trees, cityscapes, people — to the point that each detail, pose and smile seems lifted from a lifestyle ad instead of true, messy reality.

The most interesting thing about “It Ends With Us” is how it at once deploys romantic conventions and tries to wiggle around the more regressive aspects of those conventions. Finding a balance between these elements is tricky, and partly a reason that persuasive romances are so hard to pull off now. One obvious issue is that women who have actual choices — women who are straight or Sapphic or queer, who marry or don’t, who have children or cats or both — don’t easily or reflexively fit into tired Hollywood-style formulas. With her trauma and therapeutic epiphanies, her sparkly boots and Carhartt coveralls, Lily seems thoroughly modern, but she’s trapped in a story whose sell-by date has expired.

It Ends With Us Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, some language and discreet lovemaking. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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Summary Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) is a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life in Boston and chase a lifelong dream of opening her own business. A chance meeting with charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) sparks an intense connection, but as the two fall deeply in love, Lily begins to see sides of Ryle tha ... Read More

Directed By : Justin Baldoni

Written By : Christy Hall, Colleen Hoover

It Ends with Us

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‘it ends with us’ review: blake lively stars in serviceable adaptation of colleen hoover novel.

A young flower shop owner navigates a new romance and her traumatic past in a high-emotional-stakes drama directed by and also starring Justin Baldoni.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Lily also makes a new friend, a perky woman who stumbles upon the flower shop before its opening. In the logic of contrived storytelling, Allysa ( Jenny Slate ) is, of course, related to Ryle. Double dates — with Lily, Ryle, Allysa and her husband, Marshall ( Hasan Minhaj ) — become regular occurrences. 

Because Lily’s life, as rendered in DP Barry Peterson’s intimate, golden-hued visual grammar, feels like a dream, the nightmarish details can be easy to miss. It Ends With Us is a portrait of domestic abuse tucked in the frame of a romance.

Hoover’s novel, which has spent more than two years at the top of the The New York Times best-seller list, drew criticism for its depiction of intimate partner abuse. Some readers found the focus on Lily’s relationship with her abuser, Ryle, to be manipulative. Others blamed the publicity machinations for falsely advertising the novel as a love-triangle romance. The plan to release an accompanying coloring book (eventually scrapped) didn’t help Hoover’s case, either.

Although there are early signs of trouble in the relationship — Ryle’s volatile temper, for instance, and the way he repeatedly pushes Lily’s boundaries — the film is effective in how it casts a chilling kind of doubt.  

It Ends With Us struggles much more in other places. The screenplay, by Daddio director Christy Hall, makes an effort with some early winking jokes that acknowledge the novel’s clichés. But the adaptation can’t be saved from the contrivance baked into the original text.

Details are scant when not focused on Lily’s struggle with abuse and the generational patterns she wants to break. Through flashbacks, we come to learn that a young Lily (an excellent Isabela Ferrer) routinely witnessed her father beating her mother.

Few people aside from her high school love interest Atlas (played by Alex Neustaedter as a youth and Brandon Sklenar as an adult) know about this traumatic period in her life. The depth of their bond is presented to us in fitfully poignant glimpses into the past. 

A later conversation between Lily and her mother (Amy Morton) is particularly frustrating because it’s a missed opportunity to engage with the complex web of reasons survivors struggle to leave abusive relationships. 

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. 

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'It Ends With Us' Review: Blake Lively Blooms in This Heartfelt Adaptation

BookTok has become an outlet for avid readers to share recommendations and discuss novels that draw them in with their sharp storytelling. Although authors like Emily Henry and Sarah J. Maas have seen their penned efforts skyrocket in sales due to their popularity on TikTok, Colleen Hoover remains one of the writers with the most visibility on the platform and in bookstores. Her novel, It Ends With Us , took over the top spot on 2022's bestseller list . With millions of copies sold, it is daunting to picture a book that has resonated with many getting transported to the big screen in a way that maintains the same nuance and sensitivity as its source material. Yet, in Justin Baldoni 's careful hands, this onscreen adaptation similarly strikes the core.

The film follows Lily Bloom ( Blake Lively ), a vibrant florist who moves to Boston after her father's funeral and crosses paths with a womanizing neurosurgeon named Ryle (Baldoni). Although his charming and flirtatious presence captivates the protagonist from their very first interaction on a rooftop, they go their separate ways, leaving it to fate to reunite them. After opening her floral shop and hiring Allysa ( Jenny Slate ), Lily reconnects with Ryle through her co-worker. The two fall for each other in a passionate and consuming manner. Yet, despite the smiles and mismatched outfits, the protagonist grew up witnessing domestic violence at home and soon sees history repeating itself in her own relationship.

Blake Lively Thrives As a Woman Trying to Break Free From a Violent Cycle in 'It Ends With Us'

Although It Ends With Us readers were skeptical to see that an older cast was lined up for the novel's screen treatment (myself included), the final product makes it clear that aging up the characters was for the best. Lively's Lily starts off high-spirited and sassy, trying hard not to give into Ryle's blunt pick-up lines. She knows what she wants in a partner, and being the next item on his extensive list of flings isn't it. Lily is only convinced to be with Ryle after he is ready to embark on a committed relationship. Her transition from being a confident woman in love to a fearful and distraught victim is evident through Lively's performance. The Gossip Girl alum taps into her most challenging role to date with reverence, taking it upon herself to be a voice for the women watching her character's story take a violent turn . Despite the Lily onscreen being in her thirties, as opposed to the book, her experience feels more universal and gut-wrenching considering her level of maturity and strong-willed personality.

Justin Baldoni Meticulously Trails a Sensitive Subject, Never Making It Exploitative

When a topic like domestic violence is incorporated into a story, it can come out as faulty, and sometimes exploitative. That isn't the case here, and it's due to Baldoni's direction and portrayal of Ryle. Like Lily, the audience finds the character amusing and roots for the couple's electric connection, but once things go south between them, the director draws the line. In a sense, Baldoni's take on the source material is even better when dealing with this theme than Hoover's novel, because it doesn't spend time redeeming Ryle from his actions. The character's behavior in the film isn't romanticized to the point that the viewers who were captivated by him at the start no longer feel the spark when he later walks into the room. Although the skeleton in Ryle's closet humanizes him, it never takes away the weight of the abuse that he inflicts. Similarly to Lively, Baldoni has never charted this territory as a performer before, and he does so meticulously. Although he brings depth to the character, it is never enough to convince the audience to want Lily to stick around like her mother did.

Another element that positively aids the film's translation from book to screen is its soundtrack. As the protagonist falls for Ryle and sees her life slowly come to mirror that of her parents, a relationship she has grown to dread, the needle drops add even more emotion and meaning to her hardships. From Lana Del Rey to Birdy , the music perfectly accompanies her journey through the ups and downs of falling in love and then falling apart when violence gets in the way. Yet, the most poignant song choice here is Taylor Swift 's "My Tears Ricochet," which holds significance in its placement in the film. Not only does it encapsulate the burden that comes with Lily's internal struggle towards Ryle and what it means to be with him despite the tender start to their bond, but it also represents her return to being the joyful woman she once was.

'It Ends With Us' Limits One of Its Leads, and Doesn't Explore Flashbacks to the Fullest

Although the movie serves as a purposeful cautionary tale, it also incorporates a love triangle of sorts, which is left on the sidelines . Lily's first boyfriend, Atlas ( Brandon Sklenar ), comes back into her life years after their teen romance unfolded and soon becomes the support system that she needs. As a result, the character's arc is incredibly limited considering the former couple's backstory. His relationship with Lily during high school (which is presented through flashbacks, with Isabela Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter playing their younger versions) is the only background we get on Atlas, leading his adult presence in the film to be one-note. Aside from his helping hand when she needs it the most, the character barely gets the development that Lily and even Ryle have.

The flashbacks are also not as strongly interwoven with the present when it comes to Lily and Atlas' young love. The start of their romance is laid out well, but by the end of the flashback sequences, little is known as to Atlas' whereabouts after they part ways and how their happiness being cut short affected Lily. Although an adaptation can only cover so many scenes and parts of the novel that it is based on, reducing the past and the present when it comes to one of the film's most pivotal characters is a fault that is hard to shake away . It also feels a bit of a disservice to Ferrer and Neustaedter, who could've done much more than what they were given.

Despite the decision to minimize Atlas' presence to a plot device for Lily's road to breaking free from a generational cycle, Baldoni's It Ends With Us is an emotional and effective depiction of domestic violence and how to find the strength to overcome it . The film is sensitive to the main topic, and its performances and direction allow for Lily's experience to empower survivors. The project is also careful not to romanticize the aggressor, which is a positive distinction from the source material. Although slight changes were made to the story present in the novel, most of them (including the change in age) serve the adaptation well. As a whole, Baldoni's directorial effort isn't made for the fans who were drawn in by the love triangle, but rather intended for the audiences who resonate with Lily's journey, and maybe that is for the better.

It Ends With Us is now streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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It Ends With Us

It Ends With Us is a sensitive depiction of abuse and its performances elevate the adaptation.

• Blake Lively channels Lily's transition from confident to fearful seamlessly, making this her best performance to date.
• Justin Baldoni treats domestic violence sensitively as a director and lead actor.
• The film does not romanticize or redeem its aggressor, making this aspect of the adaptation better than the novel.
• Atlas isn't well-developed despite his importance in Lily's trajectory.
• The flashback sequences could've been further explored in order to sustain the connection between the adult versions of Lily and Atlas.

A woman's life takes a challenging turn when her first love reappears, complicating her relationship with a charismatic but abusive neurosurgeon. Confronted with difficult decisions, she must summon her inner strength to navigate the complexities of love and self-empowerment, ultimately shaping her path forward.

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