It Ends with Us is in deep solidarity with its source material when it comes to constructing a work that is uniquely bland and unmemorable. Stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are equal partners in this, the former’s dullness and rote on-screen presence matched only by Baldoni’s tired visual lens as a director. If we look at the women’s pictures of yesteryear—see the works of George Cukor and Douglas Sirk—they created space for women’s emotional and personal narratives to be both heightened and understood. It Ends with Us aspires towards this tradition, but Baldoni and company have none of Cukor and Sirk’s chops.
It Ends with Us centers on Lily Bloom (Lively), who moves to Boston with dreams of opening a flower shop. Having recently attended her father’s funeral, her childhood—including her father’s abuse of her mother and her high school romance with Atlas (Brandon Sklenar)—is fresh on her mind. These flashbacks are interspersed with sequences depicting her burgeoning romance with Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni). She, of course, gradually begins to realize that her relationship with Ryle mirrors her parents’ dynamic, hence the “it ends with us” of it all.
To be clear, these characters are barely recognizable as humans. For starters, think of their names: Lily Bloom is a florist. “Atlas” and “Ryle” seem ripped from TikTok or Instagram reels listing asinine names that young adults assign to their Gen Alpha kids. Considering the source material’s popularity on TikTok, this tracks.
Colleen Hoover, the author of It Ends with Us, is one of the most popular modern novelists in the romance and young adult fiction genres, her work particularly appealing to the online sub-community of BookTok. Hoover’s work has been criticized for a litany of reasons, ranging from her trite prose and reliance on truisms and conventions to her interest in erotica often seeming to coexist with heavy issues like domestic abuse or sexual assault.
By proxy, this throughline in Hoover’s work is also an issue within the adaptation of It Ends with Us. Though Baldoni’s film concocts a tragic backstory for Ryle, it doesn’t excuse or necessarily forgive his behavior, and Hoover’s novel doesn’t either (despite the claims of some moralizing detractors). It is odd, though, that a domestic abuse narrative is linearly accompanied by a cliché small-town romance. On one hand, Hoover seems to critique aspects of the patriarchy that render women helpless (It Ends with Us is semi-autobiographical in the sense that Hoover, like Lively’s character, grew up with a father who abused her mother). But she subsequently embraces that same helplessness when concocting a traditional romance—one that neatly fits within those same patriarchal confines. Perhaps the microcosmic nature of this, in that this is representative of many women’s attitudes toward sexism, is what has made It Ends with Us resonate with so many women.
The resonance certainly couldn’t come from the screenplay of It Ends with Us which, written by Christy Hall but apparently also by Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds (in an interview, Lively attributed the script of what she called “the iconic rooftop scene” to her husband), is stiff and stilted. The petty production machinations that flood the rumor mill—namely the cast and crew jockeying for more control over the script and the picture’s edit—are unfortunately the most tangibly human thing about the whole project. For instance, the aforementioned rooftop scene where Lily and Ryle meet is unique in that it is incredibly wooden in spite of the scene’s obvious attempts at idiosyncratic, quasi-quirked up dialogue.
Lily and Ryle first meet atop Ryle’s apartment building, but their meet-cute is complicated by Ryle angrily throwing a chair—an obvious harbinger of his anger issues. Lily, having recently left her father’s funeral after cutting off her own eulogy, is sitting atop the building’s ledge, contemplating the effect of her father’s abuse on her mother, and of that abuse’s effect on her. The two exchange names, after which they each incredulously laugh at each other’s names, remarking that they can’t be real. But It Ends with Us’ occasional wisecracks about the absurdities of It Ends with Us, meant to be odd and funny, hardly register as such.
This is in large part due to Lively. With every tilt of her head and faux-demure look, Lively is playing a hackneyed archetype. It’s difficult to transcend material that is so obvious, that attempts to balance melodrama and some sort of purported realism, but ends up somewhere between—creating something at once mawkish but decidedly not lived-in. Perhaps the way to deal with this, then, isn’t to gesture toward some sort of self-awareness about the insipid nature of the source material but to lean into developing a heightened version of it. In other words, a mixture of melodrama and camp: a project that amplifies feeling through hyperbolizing style. Essentially, the style of women’s pictures in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
It Ends with Us does no such thing. Its cinematography inclines itself toward normativity; its images are hyper-digital, consisting of colorless grays, and scenes are cut in standard fashion—jumping back and forth between people as they’re speaking. It’s fascinating that Baldoni has built a directorial career off of works within the YA romance genre when this formal and thematic flatness is the throughline within his filmography—though perhaps the flatness, in its universal recognizability, is the point.
It Ends with Us can pat itself on the back as a shiny paragon of why being popular on BookTok shouldn’t be enough to make it to the silver screen. One would hope a domestic abuse narrative would feel a bit more realized, but in refusing to transcend its source material, It Ends with Us only regurgitates the novel’s perfunctory treatment of its subject matter. Its ironic gibes at the inanity of Hoover’s work feel hacky, and the rest of its approach to the novel seems determined to situate a high-stakes melodrama within a decidedly lifeless world. It Ends with Us may posture at times that it’s above Hoover, but it only succeeds at proving that it isn’t.
Director: Justin Baldoni
Writer: Christy Hall
Starring: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj
Release Date: August 9, 2024
Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.