Fittingly for a story of fresh beginnings, Colleen Hoover’s 2016 memoir of domestic abuse and unresolved childhood trauma got a huge second lease of life when TikTok’s community of bookworms, #BookTok, seized on it five years later. By 2022, it was outselling the Bible.
This smart and sensitive movie version will more than satisfy the millions who’ve picked it up and found a bible of sorts for abuse survivors.
It Ends With Us begins like a soapy Nicholas Sparks adaptation about teen love with homeless boys and grown-up flings with hunky ones, but rug pulls all that in a second half that lays into toxic men and the insidiousness of abusive relationships.
Blake Lively steps into Hoover’s shoes to play wannabe flower shop owner Lily Bloom, a young woman starting over in Boston in the wake of her unloved dad’s death. He used to beat her mum (a porcelain Amy Morton) and bully her. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve never written,’ she snarks of the eulogy she’s asked to deliver.
This adaptation will more than satisfy the book’s millions of readers
Enter hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by director Justin Baldoni) to bring solace in a sexy rooftop meet cute. With that dream-guy job, sly smile and deltoids like small mountain ranges, he’s straight out of Grey’s Anatomy central casting, but the film is self-aware enough to turn its romantic tropes (and its daft character names) on their heads. Ryle is a self-confessed commitment phobe who comes waving his own red flags, and Lily’s initial wariness proves more than justified.
It Ends With Us is great at keeping the bitter and the sweet in balance. For stretches, it plays like a pure romance, with plenty of sexual chemistry and Lively wafting around appealingly in funky dungarees. Then the weather changes and ambiguously staged domestic incidents hint at darker undercurrents at work. The ‘unreliable narrator’ device works a treat here.
Jenny Slate brings quirky warmth as Lily’s new bestie who turns out to be Ryle’s sister – yes, coincidences abound in this one – and Lively is a revelation as a strong and principled woman whose complex relationship with her mum is both a blockage and a path forward. Newcomer Isabela Ferrer is her doppelganger as the younger Lily in the film’s flashback scenes. Here, she falls hard for her high-school’s homeless outsider, Atlas, who’ll be back to complicate her life as a grown-up (Brandon Sklenar).
After the nuance of what comes before, it’s annoying that the knottiness vanishes in an ending that wraps everything up in a neat bow. But you can forgive a little catharsis after what Lily endures. For anyone who’s been trapped in an abusive relationship, it’ll be needed.
Out worldwide Aug 9.