‘It Ends With Us’ Review: Maybe We Should Have Kept Colleen Hoover on BookTok

It was only a matter of time before author du jour Colleen Hoover received the film adaptation treatment of one of her novels. Hoover made a name for herself, mostly among an audience of young girls and women, after her self-published works exploded across BookTok, the literary fandom corner of TikTok that features many content creators often criticized for mainlining purely YA romance and smut. This online fandom rapidly developed into an all-encompassing, devoted fanbase, the likes of which are now infrequently seen by new authors. All your friends from high school and their moms have probably read a Colleen Hoover book, likely picking up the likes of Verity from the endcap of their local Target or WalMart.

Or perhaps they picked up It Ends With Us, the novel that truly launched Hoover into the big-time and is now fittingly the first of her novels to be made into a film. It’s the book that epitomizes the ethos of a Hoover novel: a character drama that tries to entangle elements of romantic wish fulfillment with ugly and truthful domestic drama. But more than just thematic concerns, it embodies the criticisms of Hoover’s work that have risen to the surface amid her popularity: that her books glorify and romanticize domestic violence, and that she has a superficial understanding of the complex dynamics of her characters in an attempt to make her work as broadly appealing and easy to consume as possible (let us not forget she was going to release an It Ends With Us coloring book before the immediate backlash caused her to reevaluate). To many, she’s not much more than a perfect department store author. 

Those may ultimately be harsh words to throw at the film version of It Ends With Us, but it does demonstrate why Hoover has become so ubiquitous. She’s injecting stock drama with provocative domestic issues to give it an air of importance that makes it seem more essential than it really is. You can feel the urgency that Hoover seems to think exists within the bones of this narrative, but it never rises above the most commonplace of a thin, tawdry paperback. It Ends With Us most closely resembles a high-budget, competently-produced Lifetime Original Movie.

Only in such a film could we get a scenario so artificially manufactured to hammer home some social lessons as the ones It Ends With Us attempts to provide. We’re introduced to Lily Blossom Bloom (Blake Lively), a name so ridiculous even she realizes the only path she has in this life is to open a flower shop. Following the uncomfortable funeral of her estranged father, she heads up to the roof of a high-rise in the city, where she meets a rich neurosurgeon, the equally ridiculously named Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) as he has a violent outburst by kicking a chair in a fit of anger. Nonetheless, the two end up having a heart-to-heart that leads them just to the edge of something more intimate, before Lily takes off to presumably never see him again.

That is until she hires Alyssa (Jenny Slate) to help her open her flower shop on a whim. As fate would have it, Alyssa is Ryle’s sister, and soon the two find themselves in a passionate romance, despite Lily’s initial hesitations. That type of serendipity is a major catalyst for the events of It Ends With Us, as it also leads to Lily running into a relic of her childhood while out at dinner: Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), with whom Lily had an entanglement in high school and who now serves as a point of contrast between their childhood love and the increasingly violent behavior Ryle begins to exhibit.

As is readily gleaned from the title, It Ends With Us is a film about cycles of abuse—where it begins, how it’s sustained, and the possibility for it to stop. The demonstrations of violence are two-fold: in the present day as Ryle acts on his impulses to hurt Lily, and through flashbacks, where Lily and Atlas’s (the younger versions of whom are played by Isabel Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter, respectively) budding relationship is undercut by the striking reality of domestic violence happening within Lily’s home. 

In adapting Hoover’s novel, Christy Hall’s script feels like it lacks the clearly defined delineations of its characters that would be needed to convey the harrowing psychological effects and tortured emotional weight intrinsic to the material. Lily and Ryle are given ample time to develop their relationship before things take a turn for the worse, and yet his actions don’t feel indicative or reflective of any real insights about these types of abusive men—the situation feels contrived in a way that strips it of truth. 

This is true, too, of Atlas’s presence within the story. Ostensibly a foil to Ryle and to Lily’s own father—the one example of a healthy male relationship that Lily has ever been offered in her life—the actual lack of purpose he serves within the mechanics of the plot makes him come off as a device that purely serves as a reason for Ryle’s abuse. There are sparingly few instances of violence that happen in It Ends With Us—some notes in the film’s favor are that it doesn’t revel in the violence and that Lily recognizes the reality of her situation quite quickly—but almost all of them involve an underlying jealousy that Ryle has toward Atlas, and Lily’s secretive nature about the depth of their history. 

It seems small, but it subtly shifts Ryle’s actions toward some sort of justification by giving him a rationale to fall back on. The film constantly muddles its own messaging this way—by misaligning its sympathies in an effort to complicate the pathology of the abuser at its center. That attempt at complicated psychoanalysis is, frankly, above the film’s pay grade, and it finds itself out of its depth by the time the denouement commences with a confused understanding of what forgiveness means in a situation like this. It seems to always forget the heart of the character who actually warrants sympathy: Lily.

If nothing else, the general production quality of It Ends With Us may convince you this material is more productive than it actually is. The performances are universally solid, as the likes of Lively and Baldoni sell the dialogue with an authentic flair, desperately trying to lift this material out of the depths of overblown melodrama and halfway succeeding. In the right moments, they make you believe in their relationship, with extra help from cinematographer Barry Peterson who shoots events with a handsome and unfussy finesse, allowing the material to speak for itself but providing it with an intimate flourish. There are traces of a solid, mid-budget drama made for adults here, a genre that is in constant need of new life at the multiplex. But when everything there is to appreciate about It Ends With Us is from the filmmaking itself and not the material it’s bringing to life, it makes you start to think the critiques of Hoover’s writing may have some merit. 

Grade: D+

It Ends With Us will be released in theaters on August 9 from Sony/Columbia Pictures.