by Sophie Terakes
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate
Intro:
Though replete with ridiculous character names and incredibly cheesy dialogue, the film manages to successfully blend its rather unserious, flowery façade with its heavy subject matter.
Early in It Ends with Us, florist Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) stands in her soon-to-be-open flower shop and declares that she loves flowers because, even when fresh, their beauty is fading and “lost.” Full of dark, dripping violets and fleshy, claret-red azaleas that seem to have been torn from a 16th century Dutch vanitas painting, Lily’s bouquets are certainly tinged with a sense of decay.
Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel of the same name, It Ends with Us
follows Lily as she falls head over heels for hunky neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid (played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni). The film is interspersed with flashbacks to Lily’s adolescence during which she (portrayed in her youth by Isabela Ferrer) regularly witnesses her father beat her mother. Naturally, young Lily seeks comfort in the arms of her gentle peer and first love, Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), whose mother similarly endures violence at the hands of her partners. Lily’s seemingly perfect relationship with Ryle is threatened, then, when her teenage sweetheart (played in adulthood by Brandon Sklenar) returns on the scene.
Unsurprisingly, Lily’s declaration in her flower shop becomes a potent metaphor for her own violent marriage. Like the outward beauty of a flower, her fairy-tale romance with the charismatic, chiselled-from-marble Ryle is only a lovely illusion. Ryle, we discover, is violent and abusive, tormented by memories of trauma and, as his sister Allysa (Jenny Slate) explains, “dying inside.”
The film itself works hard to balance its frothy surface and sinister depths, cosseting its viewers in an intoxicating haze of romance before eventually revealing its rotting underbelly. The film’s first half is all seduction, wiling audiences with breathy pop songs, bare thighs, glittering lights and screenwriter Christy Hall’s pulpy script.
Lively, pitch perfect as the film’s phantasmic strong-but-gentle heroine, dons a bohemian-chic wardrobe fit for Serena van der Woodsen (her character on Gossip Girl), with copious gold rings and patterned silk shirts. Conforming to the clichés of romance cinema, an ever-radiant Lively is often captured in soft focus closeups brushing away a strand of tousled hair as she looks into Ryle’s charming eyes.
Yet, for all its heady melodrama, the film portrays the insidious nature of intimate partner violence with control and care. Baldoni’s performance allows Ryle’s abusive tendencies to steadily (and realistically) creep into the frame, first ignoring Lily’s attempts to reject him and then manipulating her with affection. The film also delicately captures the way in which those experiencing violence may be unable to recognise their partner’s abusive behaviour until it becomes severe. Thanks to some careful framing, the first instance of physical violence (when Ryle strikes Lily in the kitchen) appears accidental because the camera captures it from Lily’s (literally) distorted point of view. Only later, after his manipulation and vehement jealousy become more apparent, does she see how the moment really unfolded.
Though replete with ridiculous character names and incredibly cheesy dialogue, the film manages to successfully blend its rather unserious, flowery façade with its heavy subject matter. Ryle and Lily’s world may be glossy and thin but the characters themselves, as embodied by Baldoni and Lively, prove convincing, sympathetic and affecting. The characters’ believability makes the ending all the more moving when, in an uplifting turn, Lily finally plants the seeds for change.
