It Ends with Us

• Directed by Justin Baldoni
• August 6, 2024 (AMC Lincoln Square) / August 9, 2024 (US)
• Based on the 2016 novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

A florist’s troubled relationship with a neurosurgeon is compounded when her ex-boyfriend comes back into her life. The movie is better than Lifetime movie plot sounds.

Before the recent hullabaloo I had almost no interest in watching It Ends with Us. I barely knew it existed despite the fistful of money it made in comparison to its budget. It took in $351 million on a budget of $25 million. Wowza! With all the attention it is now getting I figured it was worth my time. Great marketing if nothing else.

I expected some hint of the current drama to come through on the screen with Baldoni and Lively being good together but not great. Sometimes you can just tell. The thing is Lively and Baldoni are fantastic together on screen. One of the most believable screen relationships I’ve seen in quite some time. You believe everything between them because they make it look natural.

Part of me wanted to hate this movie. I knew nothing about any of the stars other than Blake Lively. For me her and Ryan Reynolds are moving into that John Legend/Chrissy Teigen space where they are being talked about for no real good reason other than something innocuous or dare I say cringe worthy.

Lily Bloom (Lively) is a damaged woman suffering the scars of the abuse of her mother by her father. There are two pivotal romantic relationships in her life that drive the story. The first one is with Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar in the present/Alex Neustaedter in the past) who is a homeless boy living in the empty house next door when Lily was a teenager. What it makes clear is that whether or not she knows it, Lily attracts broken things.

In the present Lily hesitantly begins a relationship with the much more enthusiastic over it Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) who up until meeting Lily was a committed womanizer. They meet after the funeral of Lily’s father as she is sitting on the roof of his building trying to collect her thoughts.

Lily is getting her flower shop ready to open and in bursts neighborhood resident Allysa (Jenny Slate) based on a ‘Help Wanted’ sign left there by the previous occupant. By a completely unexpected coinky dink she happens to be Ryle’s sister with everybody quickly bonding. As Allysa she could be a bit too much like she was forcing the kindness and the camaraderie. Yet conversely when she found out about a serious incident her character was actually likable.

The story is all cute until Lily bumps into Atlas in Boston which is the city he said he wanted to move to because everything was better there. Lily never expected it. HOW?! That was one of his major goals in life! A bit contrived, but I guess it needed to be done to move things along.

This is when we first see that Ryle might not be as awesome as we thought. If you ever watched the murder show Evil Lives Here you could see the twist coming. The transition from being a nice and charming guy taken by Lily to abusive is disturbing because it is so natural. You like this guy and then he is shown to be somebody not worth liking. Baldoni and friends do little to address his abusive nature by the end of the film. He realizes he is a scumbag and offers no pushback when Lily ends things. When in the history of humanity has an abuser that has at one point (if not several) physically hurt someone just walked away?

Despite elements of romance and the film ending on a romantic note, the story is about breaking the cycle of abuse. It’s about being strong enough to put an end to the learned behavior which leads to you getting into an abusive relationship which then passes those learned behaviors on to the next generation. By the end Lily is a single mother with a young daughter and she breaks that cycle.

There’s also the theme of coming to terms with your past and moving on from it. All the complex emotions that come with something negative that may have produced something positive, but not letting those good feelings trick you into ignoring the bad.

Baldoni did an excellent job directing this film along with acting in the film. Lively conveys the complex and conflicting emotions you might expect. The scene with her mother (Amy Morton) when she asks why she stayed with Lily’s father (Kevin McKidd) feels genuine with the answer in its simplicity being plausible and shocking.

My major gripe is Baldoni did little to build up the relationship between Lily and Atlas. Atlas has held a candle for Lily all of his life since she rescued him in multiple ways that even she didn’t realize, and she has genuine feelings for him. The movie ends with them meeting at a market and there is the hint that this is her true love and they’re going to starting over again as mature adults. We see his feelings during the course of the story, but she is largely indifferent until the meet cute.

My gripes aside, It Ends with Us is a fantastic movie. It’s traumatic and moving and just an excellent view getting more right than wrong. Worth checking out.