It Ends with Us Review – Bit of A Cop Out But Ends Right
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Lily Bloom is home after a long time for her father’s funeral, and when her turn comes to speak at the service, she offers to list five great things about her dad, maintains a moment of silence, and walks away without saying anything.
Directed by Justin Baldoni, the 2024 romantic-drama “It Ends with Us” is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. It stars Blake Lively as Lily Bloom, who starts a flower shop in Boston and falls in love with the handsome, charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kinkaid (Justin Baldoni). While things are fun and steamy between the two at first, when Ryle begins to get abusive, Lily finds it hard to end things instantly.
“It Ends with Us” begins with the funeral of Lily’s father, which helps establish Lily’s strength of character. She doesn’t give in to the societal pressure of having to say nice things about a man she clearly didn’t have a cordial relationship with. The scene then switches to her ‘meet cute’ with neurosurgeon Ryle Kinkaid. The two run into each other on the roof of a building, where Ryle walks in an evidently horrible mood, kicking around chairs in anger, but magically switches to being charismatically flirtatious when he sees Lily. And Lily decides to immediately spill the beans about her first love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar). Who does that in a first conversation with a stranger? But Ryle is even worse at conversation openers. Guess when you’re that good-looking, you don’t care about what comes out of your mouth.
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Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively look good onscreen, their chemistry is great as Lily and Ryle, especially when they just start to see each other and things are steamy. However, throughout the runtime, Blake often looks like she is not in the moment, which often feels odd. Flashbacks reveal her troubled childhood and the course of her relationship with her first love, Atlas, a boy from her school. Isabela Ferrer, who plays teen Lily Bloom, looks like Blake Lively’s doppelgänger, so she is excellent in the role; however, it also makes Alex Neustaedter, who plays younger Atlas, look very miscast. The younger Lily and Atlas don’t have palpable chemistry, so the throwback scenes were quite lack-luster.
“It Ends with Us” was very confusing to watch because despite the film being about domestic violence, the creators skirt around the issue for almost the entire runtime, like it’s some sort of phantom, or ‘he who must not be named’. It was just weird as hell to go through over 70 percent of the film and not even see the story address the problematic aspects of Lily and Ryle’s relationship head-on until the very end. I mean, at one point I began to question my own comprehension skills, wondering if I was reading things wrong. “It Ends with Us” isn’t a thriller or mystery; we all already know it’s about abusive relationships and the need to break out of the cycle of violence—hell, even the title is indicative of it—yet we’re shown a rose-tinted view of the lead couple’s love story for 90 minutes, and only the climactic moments deal with the uglier layers. Justin Baldoni’s portrayal of Ryle however in on point and helps establish how abusers can be scarily deceptive, despite the limited time dedicated to the doctor’s Hyde side.
There are a lot of pretentious layers to “It Ends with Us”. For instance, Jenny Slate plays Allysa, who simply walks into Lily’s shop even before it opens for business and asks for a job. Allysa is so well-dressed that the moment I saw her, I thought she could buy the damn shop if she wanted (I have not read the book), and it turns out she is indeed super rich. So why she decides to work in the shop after saying she hates flowers is never explained and never makes sense. Also, for no good reason, Lily’s shop becomes very popular and is even featured in a magazine, even though the rare times we see the shop, there are barely any customers. It would’ve been okay if the creators showed it as a paid feature, but no, they want us to believe that a feature focusing on new flourishing businesses in town would include both a flower shop and restaurants. Huh? It’s a very random list, intended only to facilitate a specific scene in the story.
Okay, at this point it might seem like I’ve simply begun to nitpick on the movie, but the thing is, “It Ends with Us” isn’t as serious as it should be, nor is it as entertaining as it could’ve been. Surprisingly, the climax is powerful, cathartic, and gives a satisfactory resolution to a domestic violence story that isn’t given the space it needed.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
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