You’ve Seen This One Before

The Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends With Us plays like an overfamiliar Lifetime movie with a lot more gloss and only slightly more grit. Photo: Sony Pictures

This review was published on August 9, 2024. It Ends With Us is now streaming on Netflix.

Any profundity in It Ends With Us, the first film adaptation of one of Colleen Hoover’s massively best-selling novels in which “everyone harbors relentless angst and has uniformly excellent sex,� pretty much taps out at the three main characters’ names. The movie follows Lily Bloom, a woman passionate about flowers whose self-confidence and capacity for love will one day blossom again. (That’s her middle name, by the way: “Blossom.�) Her first relationship was with a boy named Atlas, who (figuratively) mapped her heart and was probably her soul mate. And she ends up married to a man named Ryle, who is rich and charming and whose anger issues explode when he gets, you know, riled up.

There would be some whimsy to these names if It Ends With Us didn’t overshadow its didactic eccentricity with so much other melodramatic stuff. The film cycles its characters through rote romantic-drama tropes and a relentless barrage of abuse, sticking close enough to Hoover’s plot that fans of the book will be satisfied. Blake Lively is serviceable in the lead role; she gives Lily a sturdy, guarded core that makes the character relatable, though she’s never as convincingly deluded by her husband’s lies about their physical altercations as the script requires. In a scene written by Lively’s real-life husband Ryan Reynolds, the actress is all giggles and wry asides; she can be deathly dry, too, as she was in A Simple Favor. (Elsewhere, this film is as much a reflection of Lively’s connections in the business: Her best friend Taylor Swift contributed songs to the soundtrack, and her other best friend Gigi Hadid lent clothes to her character’s wardrobe.)

But It Ends With Us isn’t really the astute exploration of womanhood’s woes that it presents itself as. The brief conversations it allows about why women stay in abusive relationships are so broad in their analysis of codependency and loneliness that they’re not particularly insightful; the film never really digs deep enough to understand its characters’ decisions or motivations beyond their (say it in all-caps) childhood trauma. This is essentially just a Hallmark/Lifetime/Netflix movie with a lot more gloss and only slightly more grit, a pricier wardrobe budget, and a few lens-flare-inundated sex scenes.

It Ends With Us follows Lily in two timelines. As an adult (Lively), she’s a florist in Boston with an overbearing mother she keeps at arm’s length and a meet-cute romance with world-class neurosurgeon Ryle (Justin Baldoni, who also directed and produced the film and is embroiled in some kind of tension with the cast; they’ve unfollowed him on social media and at premieres have ignored questions about working with him). During their first conversation, Ryle asks if Lily will have sex with him, which she’s not particularly charmed by. But she softens after she sees him sympathize with a young patient responsible for an accidental death. That’s because she has her own baggage thanks to a physically violent father, from whom teenage Lily (Isabela Ferrer) hid her first love, an unhoused young man named Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), whose mother kicked him out when he objected to her brutish boyfriend. It Ends With Us uses flashbacks to this idyllic relationship to contrast Atlas’s gentleness with Ryle’s forwardness, Lily’s small-town roots with Ryle’s modernist-penthouse wealth, and the innocent sincerity of Lily’s first relationship with her more sexually charged bond with Ryle. Does all this come to a head when Lily finds out adult Atlas (Brandon Sklenar, who looks like the Mission: Impossible face machine got stuck between Scott Eastwood and Garrett Hedlund) is living in Boston, too? It sure does!

The women’s romantic-drama genre is cyclical; we had Danielle Steel, we had Nicholas Sparks, and now we have Hoover, whose works align with those predecessors in many ways. It Ends With Us bears a phenomenal resemblance to The Notebook, actually: a woman caught between two men, one blue-collar and the other privileged; a tense mother-daughter relationship fueled by resentment and a warped sense of protection; one of the men even builds Lily a restaurant, not dissimilar from how Noah built Allie a house in The Notebook. But at least The Notebook gave Allie and Noah interests and passions outside of their relationship and their jobs that didn’t neatly align with what we’d expect of them (think of Noah, a mill worker, reading Walt Whitman). In It Ends With Us, the primary risk is just Lily’s wardrobe, a mishmash of boho blouses, bodycon dresses, and enough Carhartt that you’d think you were watching Yellowstone. Otherwise, there’s no texture, no lived-in quality, no sense of surprise to any of these characters — you know Lily and Atlas are the film’s one true pairing because they’re both creative types and had abused mothers.

There’s love-triangle tension between Lily, Ryle, and Atlas, of course. But It Ends With Us wants to be more important than that, and so it can’t go more than a few minutes without reminding us of the characters’ damage — a cynical tactic that suggests we’ll only care about these three if we know how hurt they are. Beatings and bullying and backhands across the face, sexual assault and shoving and gaslighting. Admittedly, one of these scenes is so shockingly physical, and handled with such emotional acuity by Lively, that it cuts through the film’s tidal wave of misery and makes a legitimate impact. Yet even that development is resolved in a manner so tidy that it reinforces It Ends With Us’s innate conservatism. The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.