It Ends With Us: Where the Movie Fails, Fandom Takes Over

How should movies reflect our morals and values as a society? Or, more pointedly, what function does entertainment serve? This question seems to lie at the heart of the controversy surrounding Colleen Hoover’s enormously popular novel It Ends With Us and its new film adaptation. 

Commentators, book lovers, and internet denizens more generally have debated in circles whether the novel’s ambiguous depiction of abuse and domestic violence is ultimately anti-feminist. Some decry Hoover for marketing towards younger romance readers, claiming that her novel’s central romance sets a bad example for young women. Others go as far as to call Hoover’s protagonist Lily Bloom a misogynistic caricature. People seemingly expect Hoover’s books to serve a didactic purpose: If they are to be for women, they should instruct women on how to avoid abusive relationships, or better yet, serve as a quasi-guidebook for what red flags to look for when dating. 
But the idea that art and entertainment should always impart moral instruction rings false. With art, many contradictory things can be true at once. I would, for instance, call Rosemary’s Baby a cornerstone film in depicting heterosexual marriage and the state of reproductive rights in the United States, still as painfully relevant in 2024 as it was in 1968, yet it was directed by a charged sex criminal. I’m even more suspicious of the idea that so-called women’s literature should specifically be moral instruction. It’s a rather low view of women’s critical thinking skills, and it once again tosses novels targeted towards women into the garbage. 

Clearly, there’s something women get out of Colleen Hoover’s novels about the tribulations inherent to heterosexual relationships. It should perhaps worry us on a very different level that these books are as popular as they are, in the same sort of way that the popularity of tradwife influencers should alarm us. Heterosexual women are sending up flares that they are not okay, and similar to white men, white women are doubling down on fascism as a potential salve to the false promises of corporate lip service feminism and marital discontent. Hoover is more guilty of capitalizing big on that impulse than she is necessarily causing the problem. 

But more to the point, what many attribute to Hoover as nefarious I would simply call being a bad writer. At least as a film, It Ends With Us can’t decide if it’s a melodrama or realistic character piece. A movie whose main character is a flower shop owner named Lily Blossom Bloom seems unambiguously a movie of archetypes, and yet the casual viewer would be stymied by the movie’s tendency towards understatement and passivity. 

Instead of dramatic extremes or quiet character beats, the film ends up falling into a deep crevasse in between melodrama and realism, denying characters any sort of realistic motivation and propelling the plot forward with a series of increasingly forced character moments and unbelievable events while downplaying its ridiculousness with humdrum daily life and endless wooden dialogue. Call that crevasse the doldrums, perhaps. Were It Ends With Us decisively a melodrama in the vein of Douglas Sirk, it could be forgiven (and even celebrated) for its heightened emotions, extreme situations, and plot obfuscations met to appall the viewer’s moral sensibilities. But the movie cannot fully commit to the genre, pulling back from the brink to make its central romance and abuse story more muted and, I suppose, relatable, if much more bland.

The film opens with the death of Lily’s abusive father, moving swiftly to replace him with a new terrible man in Lily’s life (her soon-to-be husband, Ryle, portrayed by the film’s director Justin Baldoni). Early on there are signs that this handsome Squidward of a Boston neurosurgeon might be a less than ideal match, from his readiness to destroy furniture to his pestering of Lily, who states multiple times she is not interested in dating him before eventually relenting to his advances. 

While her life advances in increasingly wish fulfilling and unbelievable ways (for one, how in God’s good name did she afford to buy real estate in Back Bay), a chance encounter with her first love, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), sets much of the film’s abuse story in motion, as Ryle’s jealousy percolates to the surface. Through hasty flashback and cuts forward in time, the movie drunkenly wheels its way through Ryle and Lily’s relationship and divorce alongside Atlas and Lily’s teenage romance (which, I think is worth noting, she characterizes in her first meeting with Ryle as “losing her virginity to a homeless guy”). 

No one in this movie is particularly likable, yet everyone is also interminably dull. Lily’s quippyness and sarcasm comes off as xanned-out thoughtlessness through Blake Lively, and plain weirdness in her younger counterpart, portrayed by Isabel Ferrer. The scenes between young Lily and young Atlas (Alex Neustaedter) are probably the most charming and engaging of the movie, even if Hoover’s awkward dialogue cannot fully be escaped. Case in point: the entire conversation about roots, supposedly the basis of the elder Atlas’s restaurant concept, has about as much substance as the fiction books conversation between Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler in their 2014 romcom parody They Came Together. 

There are two ideas at the center of this movie, one being that there is no Good Man, and the other being that potentially Good Men are only created by the abuse or imagined abuse of a woman they are not fucking. Critics call Hoover misogynistic for the latter theme, but it's almost too pat of an explanation of the story's weirdness. Once again, the commentariat is reading Hoover as attempting didacticism, when in fact I believe she is attempting serious literary fiction, or in this case, serious Oscar bait.

It's also worth noting that this two-pronged thesis is not so much a moral claim as it is a fantasy for abused women leaving their spouses, or ideating that move. Imagine if, instead of some men being truly horrible and beyond any help from their wives or partners, any man—any man!—could be changed simply by being taught empathy. Imagine, in other words, if you had a very effective way of proving to men that women are people. 

After it’s revealed Lily is pregnant with Ryle’s child, neither the implication of termination nor even the word “abortion” are uttered. In a realistic narrative, abortion would be a viable option for Lily—but in this story, that would eliminate the possibility of Ryle having a daughter, killing any chance of him becoming an empathetic character. Lily gains humanity thus by proxy, gathering the courage to leave for the sake of their child, indulging in a greater fiction of forward progress through each successive generation. 

The truth is of course much harsher. Women’s humanity is always contingent for men. The women they see as people are simply exceptions to a reliable blanket rule, and the safety of future generations of women is hardly guaranteed. But this fantasy of women healing abusive men, along with the more realistic reveal of at least some common romance tropes as red flags, is what makes Hoover so appealing.

As an entertaining movie, It Ends With Us is a failure. Its competent cinematography and sumptuous costuming cannot hide the fact that the story that both elements gussy up is unwieldy and at times bizarre. Nor can it mask its robotic performances and staid dialogue—Blake Lively, for one, plays Lily with the flat affect of a monied wellness influencer urging followers to tap into their feminine energy and avoid 5G signals. 

As an adaptation of an already well-loved story, I can’t say for sure whether or not it’s a success. The ambiguity of Lily and Ryle’s relationship, followed by its violent climax and neutral conclusion, presents a more nonjudgmental view of domestic violence than I’ve seen in more recent media. The movie attempts to make a case for why Lily would still love or care for Ryle, even if it is unambiguous on Ryle’s abuse of Lily by the end. 

There’s a compelling case to be made for creating art and media that understands the complexity and ambivalence at the heart of many abusive relationships, and further that the men who abuse are not unusual and particular monsters, but unfortunately exceedingly average. If only that case were being made in an actually good movie. 

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