Film Review: It Ends With Us (2024)

One of the last of many films that entered history of Hollywood and cinema for the wrong reasons is It Ends With Us, the 2024 romantic drama directed by Justin Baldoni. What was supposed to be a nice sleeper hit of the season—an affectionate, crowd-pleasing adaptation of a beloved novel—became infamous for the scandal that, like few before them, exposed both the toxicity of the inner workings of Hollywood and its reflection in the tribalistic bubbles of social media. Rather than being remembered for its emotional resonance or thematic depth regarding domestic abuse, the film has been largely eclipsed by the acrimonious public relations war that erupted behind the scenes, turning a story about breaking cycles of violence into a spectacle of interpersonal warfare.

It Ends With Us actually began as rather uplifting story about the positive power of social media. It is an adaptation of the eponymous self-published 2016 novel by Coleen Hoover, which, thanks to the recommendation of the BookTok community on TikTok, gradually built a following and enough recommendation to earn the No. 1 spot on the New York Times fiction bestseller list a few years later. Even before that, it caught the attention of actor and director Justin Baldoni, who in 2019 picked it for adaptation via his Wayfarer Studios. The project seemed like a textbook case of how the modern entertainment landscape works: a grassroots digital movement propelling an indie property into the mainstream, attracting Hollywood interest from the ground up.

Blake Lively, who joined the project as one of the producers, stars as the main character, Lily Bloom. The plot begins with her return to her home town of Plethora, Maine to visit her mother Jenny (played by Amy Morton) and attend the funeral of her father Andrew (played by Kevin McKidd). At the memorial service, while preparing to provide a eulogy for Andrew by saying five positive things about her father, she simply cannot do it and leaves, a telling moment that hints at the trauma beneath the surface. Lily has arrived in Boston, where she hopes to start a career as a florist. She accidentally meets Ryle Kincaid (played by Baldoni), a neurosurgeon, and begins to flirt with him, but nothing will come of it until she actually opens her florist shop and hires Alyssa (played by Jenny Slate), who happens to be Ryle’s sister. They gradually begin seeing each other, and Lily even invites him to have lunch together with Jenny at Root, a restaurant whose owner happens to be her old boyfriend, Atlas Corrigan (played by Brandon Sklenar).

Flashbacks reveal that Lily’s father used to physically abuse her mother. Teenage Lily (played by Isabella Ferrer) has noticed teenage Atlas (played by Alex Neustaedter) squatting in a nearby abandoned house, being homeless and trying to escape his own abusive home. She begins a passionate romance with him, but it ends when Andrew catches and viciously beats Atlas. He later enlists in the Marines.

The relationship between Lily and Ryle works well until he injures her in what he claims to be an unfortunate accident. When she arrives at Root, Ryle thinks that she is in an abusive relationship and attacks Ryle. As time passes, Lily and Ryle marry, but further incidents show Ryle’s violent temper, leading to rape and injury. Lily decides to leave him, and when she has a baby named Emerson, says that “it ends with us.” At the end of the film, she reunites with Atlas.

Released in August 2024, It Ends With Us has turned out to be something of a sleeper hit, with somewhat unexpected success attributed to the novel’s fanbase, a clever social media campaign, and Blake Lively’s star power. It also caught attention by somewhat unusual genre combination of conventional Hollywood romance and a serious drama about domestic abuse. On strictly technical level, the film works relatively well. Baldoni directs the film competently, using good cinematography by Barry Peterson that makes the film visually appealing. However, there is an issue with pacing, and its running time of more than two hours would be challenging to less patient viewers.

Blake Lively, who is much older than the character in Hoover’s book, wisely decided to make it closer to her real-life age on screen. This decision, on the other hand, allowed for the casting of Isabella Ferrer as younger Lily, and the younger actress has done a very convincing job of mimicking Lively. Ferrer has good chemistry with young Alex Neustaedter. This, however, cannot be said for chemistry between Lively and Sklenar, and even less so with chemistry between Lively and Baldoni. The film also suffers from uninspired dialogue and somewhat schizophrenic chasm between Hollywood romantic fantasy—embodied in the florist shop and Alyssa being too nice to be true—and the brutal realities of domestic abuse.

The success of the novel led Hoover to write the 2022 sequel It Starts With Us, which was also optioned by Wayfarer Production for a film sequel. Under present circumstances, however, it is very unlikely that this film will be produced, at least in the near future. The main reason is the dispute between Baldoni and Lively, which began during the actual production of It Ends With Us and escalated into a full-blown PR war between the two parties. This would escalate further into hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lawsuits and countersuits, with participants accusing each other of sexual harassment and blackmail. The brutal conflict reflected itself in the world of social media, with different factions being divided into Team Baldoni and Team Lively, turning the film’s legacy into a casualty of the industry's most recent toxic spat.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

IMDb link

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