The lesson of “It Ends With Us”: If you meet a handsome neurosurgeon on a rooftop deck — a broody fellow with picture-perfect dark stubble, a dramatic way with a cigarette and a habit of taking out his aggressions on innocent nearby deck chairs — run. Seriously, just go. Do not hang around listening to him talk about how “love isn’t for me,” do not introduce him to your mother, do not put on your best Carrie Bradshaw cosplay outfit and swan around town with him. Just go.
If Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) had done this, then we would not have the movie “It Ends With Us,” a weirdly pitched romantic drama that spends a great deal of time selling us on the wonderfulness of said neurosurgeon (named Ryle, and played by Justin Baldoni), and then lets us watch him rape Lily. After he has pushed her down the stairs, and picked a fistfight with a friend of hers, and shoved her in a scene that’s so ambiguously filmed you’re not sure what actually happened. And, just to really bring home the point, the rape is juxtaposed with flashbacks of Lily’s father raping her mother; a cycle of violence, seemingly unescapable.
None of this will come as a surprise to the millions of fans of Colleen Hoover’s novel, which was written as a response to her own memories of her parents’ violent marriage. (Hoover said, in an author’s note, that she wrote the book in part to help people understand women like her mother, whose situations are “not as black and white as it seems from the outside.”) But a film is a different experience from a book, and the movie “It Ends With Us” doesn’t really bring us inside Lily’s head; it simply leaves us puzzled and horrified.
Justin Baldoni, left, and Blake Lively in “It Ends With Us.” (Jojo Whilden / CMTG)
Directed by Baldoni, “It Ends With Us” is a strange mixture of swoony romance and literal gut-punch, filled with odd choices (one role is double-cast for the purpose of teenage flashbacks — except the actor cast for those flashbacks looks far from his teens), flat dialogue and occasional comic relief in the form of Jenny Slate, who’s so delightful as Ryle’s sister/Lily’s friend that I very much wanted to follow her off-screen to another movie entirely. Lively and Baldoni both give performances that feel strangely inert, and you watch stunned by all the excuses the story offers for Ryle and the lack of any consequence for his crimes. Some Hoover fans at the preview screening cheered when Lily finally, way too late, stood up for herself; my only cheering thought was that the film was finally over.
“It Ends With Us” ★½ (out of four)
With Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton. Directed by Baldoni, from a screenplay by Christy Hall, based on a novel by Colleen Hoover. 130 minutes. Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language. Opens Aug. 8 at multiple theaters.
