Miss Flicks

It Ends with Us: Film Review

Colleen Hoover‘s novel It Ends With Us was a best-selling sensation so it was only a matter of time before the movie adaptation came along.

The film follows Lily Bloom (Blake Lively), a florist (!!) who starts dating a sexy neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) after a chance encounter on a rooftop. Over the course of their relationship, Lily begins to realise Ryle’s true colours. During this time, Lily’s childhood sweetheart Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar) returns to the scene, complicating matters with the jealous and insecure Ryle.

While I don’t like to divulge spoilers, it needs to be said that this film depicts domestic violence. Much like the book, it has been packaged as an easygoing romantic tale when it deals with a surprisingly serious subject matter. There is definitely a disconnect between what this is about and what it looks like in the marketing. So beware!

The violence is implied and the camera cuts away before you see much. You see just enough to know what’s happening. This makes sense because the film is told from Lily’s perspective and she doesn’t really know what’s going on. You see a bit more later as she becomes more aware of her situation. But is this technique minimising the domestic violence to make it more palatable or because Baldoni and co. simply didn’t think it needed to be seen?

This is a loyal adaptation of Hoover’s book, for better or worse. Elements of the story had to be streamlined to fit a feature-length runtime but some of the nuance and emotion are lost in the process. For example, you don’t get a true sense of how conflicted Lily is or how sorry Ryle is. The domestic violence incidents were shocking but lacked the visceral quality of the novel’s depiction and the script didn’t cut to the heart of why women don’t always leave. Lily’s climactic conversation with her mother (Amy Morton) should have been included to drive this home.

Despite these little niggles, screenwriter Christy Hall and director Baldoni did a solid job bringing it to the big screen. It still hit me in the feels. My eyes filled with tears and my chest felt heavy. I still felt tense and scared for Lily in those abusive situations, even though I knew what was coming. I took a while to warm up to the story in the beginning and the end needed more emotional heft but the middle is great.

We rarely get to see Lively in such an emotionally vulnerable role. This showcases her warm, bubbly personality in the first half and then her torment and access to raw emotion in the second half. Isabela Ferrer was also well-cast as the younger Lily as she has an uncanny likeness to Lively. Baldoni could have easily made Ryle into a villain but he humanises and grounds him in reality, while Jenny Slate was fun as Ryle’s neurotic sister Allysa (who belongs in a rom-com though).

It Ends with Us doesn’t quite get the balance right between the romance and the serious domestic abuse storyline – but that was exactly the problem with Hoover’s book.

In cinemas now