It Ends With Us, Directed by Justin Baldoni
Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us, adapted for the big screen last year, has a number of problems. The movie improves on some but not all these issues.
Starring Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Jenny Slate
Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing
Running time: 130 minutes
Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, sexual content, and some strong language
Many of us struggle to understand why domestic abuse victims don’t simply end the relationship. Many abused partners stay for years, even when the abuse escalates. Colleen Hoover, whose mother was a victim of domestic abuse, says that she wrote her extremely popular novel It Ends with Us to compassionately explore the emotional turmoil of someone in an abusive situation and to answer the question, “Why didn’t she just leave?”1 The book, adapted for the big screen last year, has a number of problems that have made it the target of many valid criticisms, from its overly sympathetic portrayal of the abuser to its childish writing style.2 The movie improves on some but not all these issues.
The story focuses on the relationship between Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) and Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni). Both are well-off young professionals; Lily opens a successful flower shop, and Ryle is a neurosurgeon. They fall in love and move in together, but things turn sour when Ryle becomes physically abusive toward Lily. The first two times, she lets him convince her that it was an accident—evading the difficult truth rather than accepting it and acting accordingly. After the third such instance, she flees their home and struggles to decide whether to divorce him—especially in light of her unplanned pregnancy.
Hoover wanted to make the decision as difficult as possible for Lily. Lily thinks she loves Ryle, but she refuses to be like her mother, who continued to be abused by Lily’s father until his death. She doesn’t have financial pressure to stay with him because the shop she opened has begun to thrive. However, her mother, who doesn’t know about the abuse, loves Ryle, and Lily has become good friends with his sister and brother-in-law. And Ryle puts emotional pressure on her, explaining away his behavior as an anger problem related to childhood trauma that he’s in therapy to correct and claiming that he needs her. We see her, clearly distraught, talking through this issue with her sister-in-law and her mother.
But in both the book and the film, the audience doesn’t see why Lily would be in love with Ryle. His ambition to succeed in his chosen field is his only positive attribute; other than that, he exhibits red flags from the first time she meets him, and their courtship is short and shallow. The movie tries to soften his character; it shows the couple being goofy together at a bowling alley and omits a scene in which Ryle knocks on twenty-nine strangers’ apartment doors in an effort to find Lily’s apartment for the sole purpose of asking her to have sex with him.3 By contrast, in the book, Hoover presents Lily’s feelings for Ryle as almost causeless; they start to fall for each other the first time they meet.
The movie omits one other problem present in the book: Lily’s explicit refusal to morally condemn her abuser. In the book, she agrees with Ryle’s claim that “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”4 This, of course, is untrue; a person who repeatedly does bad things is a bad person, and a repeat perpetrator of domestic violence fits this description perfectly. Lively’s portrayal of the character is less morally mushy; though she still struggles with the decision whether to leave her child’s father, she doesn’t make any such relativistic claim about his morality.
Despite Lively’s star power, the film’s lovely floral visuals, and the novel’s status as one of the most-sold books of the past decade, the movie didn’t do as well at the box office as the studio expected. This was due partly to the movie’s marketing not sufficiently indicating the heavy subject matter and partly to the film being tainted by controversy.
Lively accused costar and director Baldoni of sexual harassment (both actors are married). At one point during filming, she even went to the studio with an ultimatum: She wouldn’t continue working on the film unless certain topics of conversation (such as pornography) and actions of Baldoni’s were prohibited. Baldoni and his team responded by alleging that Lively was trying to ruin his reputation and suing the New York Times on libel charges for publishing the story.5 No further evidence will be released until the trial (scheduled for 2026), so we don’t have all the facts to determine who is in the wrong here, but either way, it’s ironic and disappointing. If Baldoni has been wrongly accused, as he claims, then a man trying to bring light to a problem that mostly affects women has fallen victim to the #MeToo culture of “blame and shame first, ask for evidence later.” If Lively’s accusations are true, however, then a man making a movie about horrible treatment of women has himself treated the female star of that film horribly, which is equally disappointing and deeply wrong.
The serious problems with the book—Ryle’s stalking and Lily’s refusal to condemn him chief among them—raise the question of whether the book should have been adapted in the first place. Baldoni told an interviewer that he had been deeply moved by the book and wanted to make it into a movie in the hopes that it would inspire others to escape abusive situations. He explained that “hearing about all of the women and people who had read the book, who had then chosen to end the cycle of violence in their life and chosen a new path and how many lives the book saved” was key among his motivations.6 It’s true that a touching book that carefully handles difficult topics such as domestic violence can save lives. Sadly, It Ends with Us doesn’t fall into this category, given that the relationship is treated as causeless, and Ryle is portrayed relatively sympathetically. Hayat Bearat, interim director of the Domestic Violence Institute at Northeastern University, points out that the book makes it seem as though affection from the abuser is why victims don’t leave; further, she argues, the novel minimizes the domestic and sexual violence in the story.7 Despite the many domestic violence experts who have criticized the novel, Baldoni charged ahead.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that he was aware—at least on some level—of some issues, given how many are omitted from the film. As a result, the movie is some improvement over the book. The impressive visuals are a big stylistic step up over Hoover’s immature writing. More important for a story intended as a romance, the film both omits some of Ryle’s arrogance and stalkerish behavior and adds some positive interaction between Lily and him. That’s not sufficient to make Lily’s internal conflict truly compelling, and arguably not enough to achieve Baldoni’s goal in making the film, but it’s a step in the right direction.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.
The book has received four million ratings on Goodreads, making it the most-rated book published in 2016 and was the top-selling novel on Amazon in 2022; see “Most Popular Books Published in 2016,” Goodreads, accessed February 5, 2025, https://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/2016;
“Amazon Bestsellers of 2022—Books,” Amazon, accessed February 5, 2025, https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2022/books;
Colleen Hoover, “Note from the Author,” It Ends with Us (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 368–73.
For a small taste of Hoover’s style, here is a line that Lily thinks before having the difficult conversation with her mother about Ryle’s abuse: “I hate it when she’s sad, and telling her I married a man who might be like my father is going to make her really sad”; see Hoover, It Ends with Us, 332.
Hoover, It Ends with Us, 68.
Hoover, It Ends with Us, 17.
Lisa McLoughlin, “Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni: Timeline of It Ends with Us Bitter Fallout,” The Standard, January 26, 2025, https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-lawsuit-b1207001.html.
Carly Thomas, “Justin Baldoni on Why It Ends with Us Needed to Be Adapted: It ‘Could Actually Make a Real Difference,’” Hollywood Reporter, August 10, 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/justin-baldoni-it-ends-with-us-interview-ryle-pressure-1235970799.
Erin Kayata, “How Does It Ends with Us Approach Domestic Violence? An Expert Explains the Impact,” Northeastern Global News, August 13, 2024, https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/08/13/it-ends-with-us-domestic-violence.