Film Review - It Ends with Us
Images courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Spoilers ahead, and a content warning for discussion of domestic and sexual violence.
Colleen Hoover’s controversial smash hit novel, It Ends With Us, has just hit theatres in all its soapy Hallmark glory. The romance/drama follows Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) as she moves to Boston to pursue her dream of, you guessed it, opening a flower shop. A chance encounter with Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), a surly neurosurgeon, has her falling head over heels in love. What the picturesque marketing campaign and genre classification of this ‘Girls’ Night Out’ Hoyts special doesn’t reveal is an insidious core of gendered violence.
It terrifies me that a movie with the potential to be as widespread as It Ends With Us portrays domestic violence and rape in such a cavalier way. Lily Bloom, despite Blake Lively’s excellent performance, comes across as a demure fantasy of a domestic violence victim. The audience is never shown the extent to which Ryle’s violent and possessive behaviour affects her. Lily Bloom’s passivity was disturbing, her lack of autonomy ever-increasing throughout the course of the narrative. Unlike shows like Big Little Lies, It Ends With Us lazily crams a nuanced issue into a short time frame. The genre jumps from comedy, to romance, to wife-beating, and finally resolves Lily’s plight with… Motherhood?
Her graceful acceptance of pregnancy and decision to keep the baby, after her separation with Ryle, felt like something out of a pro-life propaganda advert. Colleen Hoover and the film’s writers take tropes that audiences know and love and turn them into the stuff of nightmares. Lily Bloom is seemingly punished by her choice to date Ryle, the dark-and-sexy male love interest, instead of her tried and true-blue ex boyfriend from high school, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar). When Lily is saved by Atlas, a character portrayed with the emotional depth of a piece of white bread, the audience is expected to rejoice. I cannot help but feel that this outcome was painfully tone-deaf amidst the struggles of real victims of domestic violence.
As of May 2024, 27 women in Australia were murdered by partners or family members. Gendered violence is an excruciating reality for so many, and It Ends With Us is a rudely farcical take on an engrained social issue. If you were to ask me whether or not you should watch this movie, I would tell you that it is important, now more than ever, to exercise your right to choose.
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It Ends with Us is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 8th of August. For tickets and more info, click here.