‘It Ends with Us’ Review: A Cookie-Cutter Addition to the Genre

Originally released in 2016, Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us found moderate success, but it wasn’t until 2021 when the book’s popularity surged thanks to social media. The story has all the familiar elements of your typical romantic drama, but it also revolves heavily around domestic violence and ending the cycle of abuse. Director and star Justin Baldoni tasked himself with finding the right balance between being seductive and monstrous. It’s a difficult task that doesn’t quite hit its mark, mostly due to a lackluster script. There are moments where star Blake Lively shines, but they are few and far between. It Ends with Us has some interesting ideas and feels especially relevant with its themes surrounding domestic abuse, but struggles to bring everything together into something coherent.

Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) struggles dealing with the death of her father, a man she witnessed beat and abuse her mother growing up. While everyone else loved him, her mother included, she saw him for the monster he truly was. She ventures to the rooftop of a random building in the city to process her feelings, and that’s when she meets Ryle (Justin Baldoni), a dashingly chiseled man who also happens to be a neurosurgeon. There’s an immediate attraction between the two and before you know it they’re in a relationship. But Ryle’s anger starts showing up and soon Lily finds herself in the same position her mother was in. She tries to reassure herself that her situation is different and that Ryle isn’t like her father, but deep down she knows the haunting truth.

It Ends with Us starts out like any cheesy, over-the-top romance novel, with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni channeling a somewhat more tame Fifty Shade of Grey. Good looks will only get you so far, however, as their rooftop encounter is painfully dull thanks to some of the most egregious dialogue I’ve heard in quite some time. Lily asks Ryle to tell her something surprising, at which he blurts out how much he wants to have sex with her. There’s no back and forth chemistry, no sensual banter. Ryle just raw dogs the dialogue with little regard for foreplay. The script is by far the weakest element of the film, making the more emotional and dramatic scenes an uphill battle from the start.

About halfway through the film, Ryle is baking a breakfast omelet for Lily and ends up setting the smoke detector off. In haste, he grabs the hot pan out of the oven with his bare hand and accidentally hits Lily in the head as he reacts to being burned. The scene is filmed as a pure accident, although when Lily and Ryle meet up with friends later with a bruised head and bandaged hand it clearly looks like abuse. It’s only later in the film after Ryle has had a few more bursts of anger that we see the same event replayed from Lily’s perspective, and that Ryle hit her away when she was only trying to help. It Ends with Us pulls from The Last Duel and Rashomon, showing the same event from different perspectives, although not as effectively.

Initially it feels truly like a misunderstanding. Lily reconnects with her high school first love Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) and he immediately rushes in to confront Ryle without a second though. The situation continues to spiral further and further out of control when Ryle becomes jealous of Lily’s friendship with Atlas, even though she’s done nothing wrong. Things reach their boiling point when Ryle ends up pushing Lily down a flight of stairs during a heated argument. Ryle’s abuse is undeniable, and it reframes the entire portion of the film that came before it.

There is a lot of heavy and complex themes It Ends with Us tries to cover, but it only feels like it scratches the surface with most of them. There is no mistaking Ryle’s abuse towards Lily, and the film does a decent job at showing how the cycle of violence trickles down. It’s not easy to leave someone you love, even when they hurt you. That being said, the film does feel rushed in the later half, resulting in an ending that is too easily wraps up all its loose ends. When Lily says that they’re done, that’s it, they’re done and Ryle just accepts it. It’s difficult to think that someone with anger issues such as his wouldn’t lash out further. Yes, it’s a movie and there’s only so much time to cover things, but it still feels too neat in how their relationship is portrayed. The message is great, of course. It’s just the steps the film takes to get there feel slightly uncanny.

Any film that helps shine a light on domestic abuse is a good thing, and It Ends with Us earns that credit at the very least. I just wish that the story surrounding it was constructed better. There are a few shining moments, particularly in the back half of the film, where the performances come alive, but the majority of the film feels like a cookie-cutter addition to the genre that is more focused on making checkmarks on a list than delivering something with the potential to be a little more nuanced.