It Ends with Us is a frustratingly inert take on abusive relationships

Based on the 2016 Colleen Hoover novel of the same name, director Justin Baldoni's It Ends with Us immediately gets off on the wrong foot with an early exchange between Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) and Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni). These two have just met on the rooftop of Ryle's apartment. He's just dying to know the name of this beautiful woman he's encountered. The flower-obsessed Lily then gradually divulges her first name...then her last name...and finally reveals that her middle name is also "Blossom". Ryle and Lily make endless jokes about "wow, your parents must've hated you!' and further winky comments about this botanist's silly name.

Such self-aware dialogue (hailing from Christy Hall’s screenplay presumably taking cues from Hoover’s writing) had me rolling my eyes. We live in a world where the couple that spurred legalized mixed-race marriage in America had the surname Loving. Sometimes, folks just have on-the-nose names! Instead of recognizing that reality, It Ends with Us’s earliest “cutesy” romantic dialogue begs audiences to forgive a ridiculous protagonist's name. There’s a lack of confidence here that, unfortunately, signals the underwhelming movie to come.

The same day Lily met Ryle, she attended her father's funeral. This day was grueling thanks to Lily's fraught relationship with her dad. However, she's got other things to focus on, like launching her dream flower store in Boston. She renovates a crumbling building with the aid of her best pal Allysa (Jenny Slate), whose brother is...Ryle! Lily and Ryle can't stop running into each other and that quickly blossoms into a passionate romance.

Throughout all this modern-day smooching and courtship, Hall's script takes viewers back to Lily's younger days (where she's portrayed by Isabela Ferrer). As a High Schooler, she had a relationship with unhoused teenager Atlas (Alex Neustaedter). That man eventually reappears in Lily's life (now played by Brandon Sklenar). Decades later, he's the proud owner of a local classy eatery. Complicating this blast from Lily's past is that her relationship with Ryle has taken a dark turn. The love of her life has begun physically abusing her. Lily always vowed to never end up like her mother, who stayed with a brutally abusive spouse for years. Now, she’s trapped in that same relationship, unsure where to turn next.

Despite some more light-hearted marketing materials involving Lively’s partner Ryan Reynolds, It Ends with Us, conceptually is a heavy movie. This is a production about abusive relationships, toxic masculinity, and cycles of cruel behavior passed down from one generation to the next. Plenty of great movies have explored these weighty subjects with finesse. Women Talking, The Work, and Minding the Gap are just some modern motion pictures exploring some or all of these ideas so deftly. It Ends with Us, unfortunately, handles its solemn material with a lifeless touch.

Hall and Baldoni handle the various parts of It Ends with Us (steamy romance, brutal abuse, heightened melodrama) with aloofness. There’s a lack of creative commitment to this production’s various components that coalesce into an overall underwhelming experience. Early idyllic sequences with Lily and Ryle meeting, for instance, lack much of a sensual spark. For one thing, their initial rooftop meeting is set to a song warbled by a guy who sounds like coffee shop Adam Levine.

For another, the cinematography and editing fail to evoke the brewing passion between these two. Their sensual rendezvous’ occur against backdrops like a generic outdoor shopping center or a sterile ritzy loft. Vintage melodramas like All That Heaven Allows used gloriously maximalist production design and camerawork to reinforce an emotionally heightened atmosphere. Baldoni and cinematographer Barry Peterson instead opt for visual rooted in gritty reality in It Ends with Us.

As for the melodramatic parts of It Ends with Us, everyone here is “programmed with the most tragic backstory ever”. However, that “realistic” aesthetic prevents the proceedings from exploring all that torment interestingly. There's just no weight to the big revelations, no emotional oomph to grand demonstrations of pathos. Characters flippantly toss out terms like homelessness, suicide, child murder, and so many more like a waiter discussing potential dipping sauces. Despite how many of these terms crop up, Hall’s surface-level writing never delves too deeply into any of this material. Serious problems are treated like buzzwords, not psychological conditions plaguing people for years.

Compare this movie to The People's Joker, which combined an in-depth look at coping with transphobic trauma with all kinds of dark gags, surrealist touches, and a great incarnation of The Penguin. Writer/director Vera Drew's endless gumption to go visually and narratively unorthodox only enhanced the movie's exploration of psychological torment rather than hinder it. The subdued It Ends with Us, meanwhile, handles its weighty material without any imagination or insight. Just saying "suicide" is not enough to give your motion picture thematic heft.

Leading men Baldoni and Sklenar aren’t much more notable than the forgettable writing, save for Sklenar's amusingly pronounced delivery of the line “get out of my restaurant!”. These two are easy on the eyes but rarely emit compelling screen presences. Lively, for her part, is a much more engaging performer. However, the script doesn’t give her a wide range of material to work with. Immense congrats to the casting department for picking Ferrer out to portray young Lily. Ferrer is uncanny in how well she comes off as young Blake Lively. She’s got the tiniest vocal traits of this A Simple Favor veteran down pat!

Without much else to occupy my brain watching It Ends with Us, my thoughts eventually drifted to the feature's visual priorities. What elements dominate the screen in this motion picture? The anguish of women, namely. Rarely are things left to the imagination in It Ends with Us, such are the demands of mainstream studio fare. Lily’s blackened eye, her mother getting slapped on a couch, our protagonist’s frightened face as her husband pins her to a couch, these are the default images flickering on-screen. Typically, these images of agony lend equal prominence to Lily and Ryle. Was there concern the audience will forget who is abusing Lily if he’s not constantly on-screen?

These motifs led me to recall how other superior movies frame the torment of women. The Assistant, for instance, features a woman (Julia Garner) working for a Harvey Weinstein stand-in. We never see that sexually abusive superior. Audiences only witness the aftermath of his actions and how the lady protagonist reacts to this work environment.

Outstanding documentary Kokomo City, meanwhile, has real-life sex workers talking openly about (among many other topics) life-threatening encounters in their work. Director D. Smith concentrates solely on the retelling of these anecdotes. She also allows these women to speak about far more than their abuse. Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door features a critical climactic shot in a scene where J.R. (Harvey Keitel) chastises his lover, The Girl (Zina Bethune), for getting raped. Scorsese’s camera frames an important chunk of this diatribe on just The Girl, with J.R.’s head cut off in the frame. This striking image immediately puts us in The Girl’s shoes and communicates the torment she’s experienced after this trauma. The headless J.R. now represents all the men blaming her for this tragedy rather than the male perpetrator. On and on the examples go.

Movies are not automatically “superior” if they keep the misery of women off-screen. However, the default visual langauge of cinema has been to concentrate on ladies in peril at the hands of men. Just think of all the B-action movies that have women sexually violated on-screen to provoke male protagonists and give the feature some nudity. If you’re going to engage in this material, you have to do it in a visually thoughtful manner. It Ends with Us fails to do that. It’s not an “enragingly bad” movie. Baldoni and company’s approach to capturing a woman in an abusive relationship, though, offers nothing new. Everything is boilerplate.

The only real standout element, beyond Ethel Caine's welcome presence on the soundtrack, is Eric Daman's costume design. It Ends with Us features some tremendously striking outfits, particularly anything Allysa dons. Whether it’s an astonishing red maternity dress or a glittery party dress, Allysa is always splendidly dressed. Lily, too, has a nicely distinctive wardrobe (including an overall jumpsuit) that deftly compliments her personality. These costumes are among the few flourishes in It Ends with Us that really resonate as idiosyncratic. The rest of the feature is, unfortunately, just as frustrating and disappointing as all that comedic dialogue about Lily Bloom's name.