At it’s best, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us manages to evoke Stephen King’s It. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, the film begins in the small fictional town of Plethora, Maine. A drone shot introduces us to the landscape of King’s home state, where lakes and fall foliage dominate the screen. Soon, these images are eclipsed by the childhood home of Lily Blossom Bloom (Blake Lively). This eerie family domain is haunted by memories of domestic violence that are reminiscent of Beverly Marsh’s experiences in It. But unlike King, who highlights then amplifies the horror of everyday life, It Ends with Us cheapens its strongest rallying points by packaging them in between romantic comedy tropes that ultimately land as cringe-worthy and dated rather than moving.
Despite the lingering, unspoken trauma that is insinuated early in the film, insane dialogue coupled with poor acting choices are littered throughout It Ends with Us. This is particularly evident in the “iconic” meet cute scene, where Lily first lays eyes upon her love interest Ryle (Baldoni). Situated on some random rooftop in Boston, Ryle looks like he walked off the set of a Dolce & Gabbana perfume ad while Lily is dressed in Carhartt coveralls. The idea here is that opposites attract, but their rapport is more accurately reflected in their costuming. At one point, Lily asks Ryle about his profession, and when he replies “neurosurgeon,” she breaks into a fit of laughter and says, “I thought you were a crypto bro or a really expensive prostitute.” And Baldoni and Lively overcompensate for their algorithmically raunchy dialogue with intense eye contact that feels rehearsed. In the long term, this lack of chemistry could be seen to foreshadow their future relationship or the breakdown of the film’s bonkers press tour, but in function this scene is meant to be one of the most significant moments of Lily’s life. It should register as genuinely sexy and intense, not awkward.
Bad to the poor costuming: it plagues Lively’s performance, as do bad hair choices. Through flashbacks, we learn that Lily is really a down-home girl at heart. She grew up in Plethora, loved flowers, and fell in love with the boy next door, Atlas (played by Alex Neustaedter as a teenager and Brandon Sklenar as an adult), who was homeless at the time. They cooked and planted a garden together, creating lifelong memories, and as a result, Lily is always wearing some sort of workwear. Carhartt and canvas are folded into Lively’s Anthropologie florals and Free People crop tops, a reminder that Lily has never forgotten her roots, but Lively’s look registers as overly curated millennial rather than organic to the character. In other words, It Ends With Us simply feels too self-consciously manufactured.
Cosmetic flaws (of the ostentatious variety) aside, It Ends with Us at least handles its domestic violence storyline with nuance. Eric Daman, the film’s costume designer, has stated that Lily’s workwear accents are like a “protective outer layer and shell,” but Lily appears strong to viewers. What is she afraid of? During the film, she opens a thriving flower shop with the help of Ryle’s rich sister Allysa (Jenny Slate), who only wears couture at said shop. Lily herself possesses a multitude of privileges: she’s pretty, white, thin, and heterosexual. She attracts people easily, and on top of everything, her personality is observably warm and expressive. Yet, despite these advantages, she still ends up in an abusive relationship like her mother, and the film’s approach to detailing DV’s ambivalence toward status, beauty, or sexuality is handled with surprising restraint.
Elsewhere, Lily’s acceptance of others situates her character as an unreliable narrator, and this idea plays out slowly across the film. Like Lily, we don’t process her abuse in real time. We see what she sees. Love allows her to make excuses for Ryle even after he throws her down a set of stairs, and her denial constructs a realistic spiral of shame and embarrassment that ties her to her mother’s legacy as a victim, something Lily has rejected her entire life. Rather than laying her cards on the table with unnecessary dialogue, we see Lily’s pain manifest quietly through her body. Wounds appear on her face even as memory remains shaky. For the first time, Lily does not have the words to express herself, and the way this pain is subtly depicted represents the film’s most the moving considerations.
Unfortunately, its final act erases these strengths. Rather than leaning into a reckoning with the fallout of DV, It Ends with Us chooses to tie everything up in a pretty bow. The plot, and Ryle’s eventual comeuppance, becomes merely didactic and reductive, and reaches for “the father of daughters” territory, as Marya E. Gates observes in her review. This, along with the co-mingled romantic comedy tropes, dates and cheapens the film drastically, despite the care it brings to its more sensitive elements. Ultimately, then, It Ends with Us lands far closer to the realm of Sex and the City, punctuated with tinges of white feminism and Taylor Swift needle drops.
DIRECTOR: Justin Baldoni; CAST: Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: August 9; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 10 min.
