Many have read the Colleen Hoover 2016 bestseller the movie It Ends With Us is based on. Like the book, the film adaptation is about a female adult survivor of domestic violence whose mother stayed with her abusive husband.
The end credits, by the way give viewers a resource, the anti-violence group No More.
In It Ends With Us it’s made clear that protagonist Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) has, understandably, been careful in her choices regarding men. But when Ryle (Justin Baldoni) comes along, trouble lies ahead. Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times, cutting to the chase: “The lesson of ‘It Ends With Us’: If you meet a handsome neurosurgeon on a rooftop deck — a broody fellow with picture-perfect dark stubble, a dramatic way with a cigarette and a habit of taking out his aggressions on innocent nearby deck chairs — run. Seriously, just go. Do not hang around listening to him talk about how ‘love isn’t for me,’ do not introduce him to your mother…Just go.”
Yes, the chairs were the first warning sign. Then, his inability to take no for an answer. Oh, and he just happens to be the brother of her bestie Allyssa (Jenny Slate), her employee at her new flower shop, so he’s around a lot. She dates him; she marries him. The abuses begin.
Caroline Siede, Girl Culture: “We experience jolts of violence as Lily experiences them: Brief, disorienting blips she tries to intellectualize away or startling flashes of memory that wash over her unexpectedly. When she plasters on a smile, we understand it’s both an act of self-delusion and also, more importantly, one of self-preservation.”
But after a terrifying rape, Lily contacts Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), the former boyfriend of whom Ryle is insanely jealous, to take her to the hospital, where she finds out she’s pregnant.
Lily stays away from Ryle. When she has the baby girl, Ryle is at her hospital bedside, though, wanting them to be a family. She asks him, in a series of pertinent questions, to consider what their daughter’s life would be like if they were to stay together. We know without her saying that she thinks it would suck—look what’s happened to her. She asks for a divorce.
Wait. She feels safe enough to do this at this very moment? He’s still him, you know.
His back story, by the way—that he accidentally shot and killed his older brother when they were kids—is obviously something he’s never dealt with. It is definitely not an excuse for his abusive behavior.
Nick Schager, The Daily Beast: “Confronting, and severing ties with, violent men is an arduous and terrifying process that requires clear thinking, courage, and a plan to ensure one’s safety. However, in Lily’s case, it proves insanely easy…”
Selected Overall Critiques to Consider
Lovia Gyarkeye, Hollywood Reporter: “Issues of cliché and vagueness plague all the characters…Any interest from the script in exploring her florist business evaporates once men begin to figure more prominently in her life. Her friendship with Allysa, while meaningful to Lily, also is underexplored.”
Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times: Jenny Slate is “so delightful as Ryle’s sister/Lily’s friend that I very much wanted to follow her off-screen to another movie entirely. Lively and Baldoni both give performances that feel strangely inert, and you watch stunned by all the excuses the story offers for Ryle and the lack of any consequence for his crimes.”
Nick Schager, The Daily Beast: “By concluding in fairy tale fashion, It Ends with Us utterly undermines its heroine, whose struggle to overcome her plight—aided by an ideal support group—is barely a struggle at all. This isn’t heartening hopefulness; it’s misleading B.S. dressed up in typical romance-novel trappings…”
