“It Ends With Us” Review: Blake Lively Confronts the Chains of the Past and the Pains of the Heart

Costar Justin Baldoni directs this adaptation of Colleen Hoover's passionate bestseller

Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel — now adapted into an earnestly imperfect but nonetheless satisfyingly sensitive film — begins with narrator Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) describing herself on a note of ironically downbeat humor: She's “that strange girl with the erratic red hair who once fell in love with a homeless guy and brought great shame upon her entire family.”

But that was in high school. In this moment she’s up on the rooftop of a deluxe Boston apartment building, where she’s just met Ryle Kincaid (Jane the Virgin's Justin Baldoni, who also directs).

Ryle is the complete package, the golden ticket, the ship come into harbor: He’s a brilliant neurosurgeon with smoldering good looks and an immaculately conditioned helmet of hair.

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Lily has every right to swoon, although she’s too stubborn to give in immediately. But she will.

And then she’ll suffer. Why? Because Lily has yet to fully reckon with the physical and emotional abuse that she and her mother (Amy Morton) endured at the hands of her father (Kevin McKidd) back in Plethora, Maine. That’s an odd name for a place — Bountiful might be nicer — but it’s indicative of an overabundance of issues that will creep from her past into the present, where they'll threaten to wreck the future.

For a while Lily seems to thrive. She marries that dreamboat surgeon. She opens a successful flower shop, a cozy little space crowded with petals, plants, twigs and bric-a-brac. Talk about a plethora! You can imagine Queen Victoria and her royal entourage sweeping in, giving the place the once-over and taking home a few strands of ivy to decorate her commemorative bust of Prince Albert.

But perhaps Lily should have noticed how violently Ryle kicked a chair the night they met....

Lively's performance is very much in the style she established back in her Gossip Girldays: She has a willowy vulnerability, an intriguing air of remote sadness and a soft, muffled voice that sounds as if she were speaking from within a pile of autumn leaves.

She’s a lovely, talented actress, and a bit like Gwyneth Paltrow — except that Paltrow can cut through a moment with unexpected, deep flashes of insight. Lively is more modest, but she's probably also the right actress for this movie, which has a soothing gauziness despite the underlying toughness of its story.

It also has a passive indifference to concrete detail that can let the narrative slip. When a key character from Lily’s past shows up at her table in a fancy Boston restaurant, it’s not clear whether he’s the owner, the chef or just a waiter with a strange air of intimacy. If he asked you about allergies, you might think he was trying to insinuate something.

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In fact this is Atlas (1923’sBrandon Sklenar), the grown-up version of that homeless boy Lily once loved. His arrival — once you grasp who he is — turns out to be a deft plot device that propels the story to a new level of crisis and, finally, a touching conclusion.

Although here, too, Blake seems to hold back from delivering the full dramatic weight of the confrontation that allows Lily to finally break with the past. Not that she needs or ought to be soaring over the top — leave that to Emma Stone in whatever Yorgos Lanthimos movie she's starring in at the moment. But the scene could have been a corker.

It's possibly worth comparing Ends with Priscilla, Sofia Coppola's 2023 film about Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) and her suffocating marriage to Elvis. That film was, like Ends, a portrait of an emotionally inert young woman who slowly comprehends the falseness of her life. But you never expected Priscilla to behave differently in any given moment of her evolution, so assured was Coppola's quiet authority at maintaining tone.

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Here you find yourself distracted by Lively's stylish intelligence. Even wearing a pair of overalls, she could get quite a way up the red carpet at the Met Gala before being turned back.

Ends, it has to be said, is at its best when it flashes back to the past, where Isabela Ferrer is the young Lily and Alex Neustaedter the young Atlas. (Ferrer is a perfect physical match for Lively. Neustaedter and Sklenar don’t look as if they share a single chromosome.) This teenage romance has the genuine urgency of adolescent misery, which (you may or may recall) stings with its unanticipated newness and can’t be relieved by looking forward to the day that you blossom into Blake Lively.

Jenny Slate, as Lily’s rich sister-in-law, sidles in and out of the movie in her shrewdly comic way — sweet yet slightly subversive. She’s a cupcake fresh from the bakery in your unconscious mind.

It Ends With Us is in theaters now.

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