Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us is the new, A-list crown in author Colleen Hoover’s romance novel empire. Adapted from her phenomenally successful book of the same name, the movie is produced by Blake Lively who also stars as Lily Blossom Bloom, who falls for the tall, dark and handsome Ryle (Baldoni, doubling as director and actor), all the while reconnecting with her first love, perennial good guy Atlas (Brandon Sklenar).
It Ends With Us is the most successful of Hoover’s books, but all of her stories are bound by similarly vague titles, colourfully nondescript covers and feature characters with names like “Clayton” and “Rylee” and “Chastin”. They have also all rocketed to the New York Times bestseller list, proving that Hoover has fascinating staying power. For my own part, I have seen her books strewn across Instagram stories and TikTok videos, notable as the holiday reads from the friend of a friend of someone I knew from secondary school. Perhaps unfairly, these books have come to act as shorthand for a certain kind of female reader. To put it in brash, internet terms: Colleen Hoover is Sally Rooney for people whose Girls is Friends.
Ryle and Atlas’ bad-boy-versus-good-guy dichotomy is upended by the thread of domestic abuse which runs, ugly and unavoidable, through Lily’s life, starting in flashbacks with her abusive father (Kevin McKidd) and reemerging with horrible clarity upon Ryle’s introduction. Suddenly montages of Lily and Ryle’s smiley closeups are replaced with long, tense dialogue, culminating in blurry fights. Functionally, this could serve to illuminate something fundamental about abuse, which simmers beneath moments of genuine connection soundtracked by well-known pop music. But this is actually part of the film’s failure, which struggles to balance the lightness of romance and the depravity of violent relationships. It is a conundrum summarised perfectly in Eric Daman’s wacky costume design, which attempts to merge high (a sparkly ballgown) and low (an oversized camouflage jacket) elements with undeserved aplomb. The result is a visual headache, overcrowding every frame with colour, texture and patterns, rather than building to some carefully orchestrated tension.
Supporting survivors of domestic abuse is an easy cause to champion, and as such feels deliberately depoliticised in art. When Lily reflects on her relationship with Ryle late in the film, it is old scenes cut together from a new angle, exposing his otherwise hidden anger slowed down and close-up. The film argues that his exploitative nature was always there and Lily had avoided it, but abuse is slipperier in real life – lying dormant for some and hideously apparent to others. Were Baldoni, or indeed Hoover, more willing to invest in the community of characters around Lily, Ryle’s abuse could ripple across her friends and coworkers revealing itself more honestly and organically in ways that remain untranslatable to Lily until the breaking point.
The best scene in the film is between Lily and her best friend Allysa (Jenny Slate, who sports some of the film’s more brain-bending outfits) when the former finally reveals her now-husband’s abuse. Both actresses are locked into a compelling chemistry, removed from the rest of the film’s more cliched beats. It’s a nice scene, captured simply in shot-reverse-shot, but confirms that the couples in Hoover’s world fail to propel her love stories further, and that the foundations of these romances are shaky at best.
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ANTICIPATION.
The audiobook had kept me hooked with bizarre details and turns of phrase, but it was also a slog to get through. 2
ENJOYMENT.
It’s always going to be nice to watch attractive people kiss, but when the story insists on being about “more” it feels unwieldy and punishing. 2
IN RETROSPECT.
It is exactly as good as you would expect a Colleen Hoover adaptation starring Blake Lively in a big red wig to be: not very. 2
Directed by
Justin Baldoni
Starring
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate
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