It Ends With Us review: Blake Lively’s new film is glittery and traumatic

The film version of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us is an unwieldy yet compelling fusion of glittery fantasy and traumatic introspection.

Warning: Mentions domestic abuse.

OPINION

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni bring Colleen Hoover’s bestseller to unwieldy, heartbreaking life on the big screen.

Millions of readers swooned over Colleen Hoover’s thorny romance It Ends With Us, the No 1 best-selling novel of 2022 AND 2023. They’ll come prepared for the clobbering heartbreak - and will hopefully pack an extra hankie for any non-fans entering the movie theatre as blank as if they’re on a blind date.

The film version, helmed by Justin Baldoni (the director of Five Feet Apart and the leading love interest of TV’s Jane the Virgin) and adapted for the screen by Christy Hall (Daddio), is an unwieldy yet compelling fusion of glittery fantasy and traumatic introspection. Our heroine is the flamboyantly named Lily Blossom Bloom (Blake Lively), a salty, funny Bostonian with her own (what else?) flower shop. Her beau, Ryle (Baldoni), boasts the résumé and abs of a 21st-century Prince Charming. A wealthy neurosurgeon, Ryle swears that Lily is the only woman who can heal his own damaged heart. He’s also the brother of her best friend and employee, Allysa (Jenny Slate). And did I mention the abs?

But Lily can’t stop thinking about a lonely, physically scarred high school boy she once knew in a small Maine town where her father (Kevin McKidd) was the mayor and her mother (Amy Morton) his kowtowed wife. In flashbacks to her teenage years, young Lily is played by Isabela Ferrer and her kiddie crush, Atlas, is Alex Neustaedter. By now, you’ve probably predicted that we’ll see Atlas again as a hunky adult (Brandon Sklenar), and that all hunky heck is going to be unleashed.

Lily is a Pinterest board come to life.

It Ends With Us savours the trappings of a glossy love triangle: the banter, the flirting, the turbulence, the extravagant costumes. For a while, it takes place in an idealised reality where the fall leaves are always the perfect shade of orange and Lily’s hair colour mimics a cozy pumpkin spice. With her store decorated like a Victorian mourning parlour and her wardrobe brimming with rhinestone boots, noisy patterns and oversized coveralls, she’s a Pinterest board come to life, an adorable kook outdressed only by Slate’s Allysa, who has the chutzpah to show up to work in a sequined Valentino mini dress and five-figure Hermes Kelly bag.

Yet, as a director, Baldoni is even more of a seducer than his own paper-perfect character. He knows that wounded, brooding sex symbols like Ryle are an irresistible erotic trope stretching from Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester to Fifty Shades of Grey’s pommel-horse-riding billionaire Christian Grey. Fans pant for romantic male leads who blur the line between passionate and aggressive - and that murk is exactly what the story explores. How can an extravagant gesture double as a red flag? How do emotionally smart girls who’ve vowed never to repeat their parents’ mistakes wind up doing just that - and how long will it take them to recognise it?

The movie has to cheat a bit to get at the complexity of Hoover’s book. A child of domestic abuse, Hoover writes with painful intimacy about Lily’s struggle to claw free from her past. Baldoni shifts some of that turmoil to the audience, with editors Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan cutting key scenes so that, like Lily, we don’t know what to believe.

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a sub-plot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behaviour. (Even so, someone at my screening audibly booed him like he was Snidely Whiplash.) Baldoni more generously recognises that he’s playing a human work-in-progress, but we rarely have a sense of what’s happening underneath his smoulder, perhaps because Ryle hasn’t had enough therapy to know.

Even bouncing off male leads who are more pinball bumpers than dimensional characters, Lively gives a great performance as a headstrong, sensible woman who struggles to consider herself a victim. The first cracks in her composure come when her smile shifts from sincere to steely; later, there’s a terrible, beautiful scene where the way she says “I love you so much” choked in my own throat. Her Lily looks and acts like a fanciful rom-com caricature, but her bruises hurt down to the bone.

Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At theatres. Contains depictions of domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language. 130 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.