It Ends With Us (Baldoni, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

As with director Justin Baldoni’s last film, Five Feet Apart, the adaptation of much-buzzed about Colleen Hoover novel It Ends With Us falls in line with a tradition of glossy, mostly anaemic literary adaptations more interested in transplanting the events of a book in a way that slides down smooth than offering us anything particularly challenging. You know the type – Where the Crawdads Sing, My Sister’s Keeper, The Fault in Our Stars, and so on – soapy tearjerker bestsellers with a committed audience who aren’t there to see their beloved texts challenged or interrogated with any intensity. That’s fine, by the way – one should keep in mind who the film is intended for, and what style the film is working in, even if it isn’t necessarily a style preferred by the reviewer. In all fairness, I’ve found this kind of classical, unchallenging approach to pay off in the past, being one of the few who found a lot to like in Where the Crawdads Sing’s hilariously faux swamp melodrama. I have not read Colleen Hoover’s book, though in my other life working at a high school I am aware of its popularity with both teenage girls and older women, and brought along a colleague who assured me of the film’s general faithfulness to the novel. The way this particular story, one that melds frothy relationship drama with po-faced depictions of generational abuse, has caught on with the public in such a feverish way is fascinating, perhaps suggesting that some delivery systems that still get eyerolls from the highbrow crowd – soap operas, YA novels, genre offerings and the like – nevertheless continue to have a profound, sometimes positive impact. At the end of the day, if It Ends With Us inspires someone to leave an abusive relationship, job well done. 

Whether the film actually works, though, is another question. With the condensed timeframe of a film, managing a tone that I assume has more breathing room in a novel is a fraught endeavour, and one that Baldoni’s It Ends With Us struggles with constantly. The film stars Blake Lively as a florist named – sigh – Lily Bloom (and yes, the film makes jokes about that, but that still doesn’t make it okay), who has left her life in small town Plethora, Maine, where her parents’ abusive relationship was a constant source of pain, to start anew in Boston with a rundown locale she aims to turn into a trendy flower shop. Along the way, she meets hunky neurosurgeon Ryle – one can see where the accusations that this series is ‘YA for adults’ have arisen from – played by Baldoni himself. Known for playing Jane the Virgin’s love interest, the incredibly ripped and symmetrically featured Baldoni is an interesting choice for a character we will come to know has many, many demons, namely a terrible temper that introduces itself to Lively’s Lily only gradually, until it is too late. Their relationship is further complicated by the reemergence of Lily’s childhood love Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), who also has escaped a life of abuse.

Five Feet Apart director Justin Baldoni adapts the hit Colleen Hoover novel for the big screen, resulting in an expectedly lacquered and glossy offering, one often at odds with the deadly serious material at its core. Lumbering under an over-extended runtime, too many moments simply fall limp for its message to land with an impact.

The first hour or so of It Ends With Us plays almost exclusively as a romance, reflecting the way in which a romantic partner can at first say and do all the right things, only to later reveal their true colours. In practice, on screen, this sequence moves slow as molasses. At over two hours, It Ends With Us is a lumbering beast, one that assumes our interest in these characters will sustain the bloat, but offering little to define them beyond their most obvious contours. There are long scenes of courtship, extensive flashbacks, a litany of side characters (including a joyous and very welcome Jenny Slate, who serves as comedic relief). These early scenes are also very clearly the stuff Baldoni is more comfortable with, giving an inordinate amount of oxygen to them. Even here, though, there’s much to be desired. The script strains valiantly to come off as effortless and clever, but the long sequences of dialogue turn meaty and cumbersome in the actors’ mouths. Neither Lively – who is clad throughout the film in some of the most howlingly poorly-styled outfits imaginable – nor Baldoni are performers with the kind of dramatic chops needed to sell the later sequences of the film, but even here, in their element, they struggle. The bond they share is a kind of anti-chemistry, an interplay that a more accomplished filmmaker could render into something paradoxically watchable, but which here flails about until the darkness descends. Better is Sklenar, whose down-to-earth boy-next-door charm works better with Lively and makes their relationship something genuinely easy to root for. 

Lively, an actress with a lot of likeability but dramatic abilities that only shine in certain types of roles (see A Simple Favour, The Shallows), puts in commendable effort to achieve depth here but never quite excels. Her performance never embraces the soapy abandon required, nor does it feel anything more than technical in moments of high drama. To be fair, this identity crisis is one shared by the film in general. That strange, slightly unsettling mishmash of rom-com and abuse drama sticks in the craw, a deeply uncomfortable blend that Baldoni doesn’t seem capable of facing head-on. Part of this is in the characterisation itself – Lily and Ryle are both visions of upwardly mobile upper-middle class types, unreal-seeming in almost every respect, from the influencer-perfected gentrification-core of Lily’s flower shop to her terrible but intricately constructed outfits to Ryle’s work as a neurosurgeon (which we of course never see beyond his occasionally being dressed in scrubs). This unreality is well-suited to a soap, but not so much to the very real issue of domestic abuse. The tropes of the soapy rom-com work against the importance of the message – a centrepiece scene near the end of the film in a hospital (readers will surely know the one) is positioned as a moment of triumph, but has the film worked hard enough to dismiss Ryle’s many surface charms or to counteract the urge to explain away his many cruelties? Whether you will accept It Ends With Us’ attempts to explain the roots of Ryle’s abuse, and even offer something like redemption near the end of the book is something that is dependent on the viewer, though I am aware it has been the source of controversy in the book too. There’s a tragic sting in the tail of Ryle’s history, one I genuinely did not see coming, and which offers a Rosetta Stone for the person he has since become. It Ends With Us walks a fine line between explaining and excusing Ryle’s actions, and I can’t honestly say that it doesn’t occasionally stumble into the latter. Relationships are complex, but this kind of complexity is not necessarily given an appropriate treatment by the inertly sentimental construction of the film, a work that desperately wants to have its arsenic-flecked rom-com cake and eat it too. 

It Ends With Us is in cinemas now.

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