It Ends With Us review: A textbook Tumblr tragedy

If It Ends With Us was released during 2014’s Tumblr era, it would have been unstoppable. Alas, we’re 10 years on, and the hazy filters aren’t romantic like they once were.

If you’ve been a social anomaly and not created a TikTok account (a wise choice), you’ll probably know It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover’s romantic tragedy novel that took the platform by storm in 2021. Telling a subtle story of domestic abuse in a well-worn childhood sweetheart love triangle, floods of people were reduced to tears.

It’s now received the live-action adaptation treatment, fronted by Blake Lively and directed by Justin Baldoni, eight years after it was published. Yet, the new movie remains loyal to its time – that’s not the compliment Baldoni might like it to be, though.

It Ends With Us is a female-driven story tackling some essential and vulnerable issues that are much bigger than its linear narrative can fit – and in the context of a woman driving the ship (in this case, Hoover), it works. With Baldoni at the helm, there are some glaring problems caused by its onscreen circumstances, while he’s largely done a solid job with the adaptation itself.

A faithful adaptation, plus Blake Lively

The film’s opening shot follows a car pulling up in front of a small-town American porch… and where have we seen that before? Despite this initial touchpoint being indistinguishable from every single film we’ve ever seen before, it eventually finds Lily Bloom (Lively), a woman coming to terms with her father’s death while trying to open her dream florist’s shop.

One day she meets Ryle Kincaid (shocker – also Baldoni), a neurosurgeon who displays red flags from the moment he arrives on screen. After some resistance, the two begin dating, and all is well… until they run into Lily’s childhood sweetheart Atlas (Brandon Sklenar). As you can imagine, it doesn’t bode well for Lily, who suffers Ryle’s unregulated rage.

It Ends With Us is sort of a tale of two halves. On the one hand, we’re witnessing a horrific instance of domestic abuse (which really just scratches the surface of what victims experience in real life). On the other, we’re watching something painstakingly packaged to fit a certain look, mold, and expectation, which gives us a cookie-cutter, watered-down version of a story that could have been truly groundbreaking.

This is a film for the 2014 Tumblr girlies – only they all grew up, got jobs, and dealt with their relationship trauma. The girl-about-town looks different now, and despite being set in 2021, Lively is every bit the girl of yesteryear she used to be in Gossip Girl.

In fact, Lily is totally indistinguishable from Lively herself, which continuously pulls you out of the movie’s most emotional moments. Nobody can (or perhaps should) be wearing two pairs of trousers at once, but Lively can pull it off. Of course she can! She’s A-list cool girl, forever fave, Blake Lively. That’s something we’re never allowed to forget.

Brandon Sklenar’s Atlas is a thinly veiled echo of Virgin River‘s Jack, while Ryle’s sister Allyssa (Jenny Slate) is totally misplaced. Slate seems like she’s walked into the wrong SNL skit and just given it everything she’s got regardless. She’s underused, but also tonally mismatched with the Gilmore Girls aesthetic It Ends With Us is going for.

Falling short in more ways than one

Sony Pictures Releasing

While Baldoni should be commended for just how faithful he’s stayed to the book’s adaptation (surely helped by Lively’s role as producer), him indisputably being the driving force of production teeters on problematic. It’s 2024, and absolutely nobody wants to have women’s trauma explained to them by a guy. Throw in Baldoni casting himself as the main love interest, and it’s giving unnecessary ego.

Of course, we’re not expecting a tragic rom-com to be a bastion for all things domestic abuse, accurately portraying every single nuance of something so painful and scarcely shared. We also shouldn’t accept it, either. Instead, it’s just this weird niggling feeling in the back of your mind that what’s happening isn’t sitting cohesively. Is anything really doing itself justice, and are we actually getting a good movie?

It Ends With Us is a middling result. You can’t really fault much – the visuals and cinematography are dutifully fulfilling, the idea itself is solid, and bar Lively’s unnecessary juvenile laughter, the acting meets the movie where it needs to. Yet, it’s neither a romantic classic nor a damning tragedy, and I doubt it will have the whirlwind effect that its novel counterpart did a few short years ago.

It Ends With Us review score: 3/5

When I got to the screening, the Olympics was playing on a jumbotron screen outside the theater. I wish I used my time to invest in two hours and 10 minutes of equestrian showjumping instead.

That’s not to say It Ends With Us is out-and-out bad, it’s just frustratingly average – something we’ve had plenty of in 2024. Peppered with solidly portrayed, surface-level trauma, the movie acts more as a showreel for how cool Blake Lively is, and how much we want to be her regardless of what life throws at us.

I know how cool she is… I was in the trenches with Gossip Girl. The target audience for the film will know this too, and frankly, they’re better off sticking with the wildly successful, female-driven blueprint.

If this review hasn’t quite sold you on the movie, check out the best movies of 2024 alongside new movies streaming this month. You can also take a look at the best fall episodes of Gilmore Girls to actually feel like you’re in Maine.