To Understand Abuse, ‘It Ends with Us’ Can’t Be the Final Word

[Editor’s note: This piece contains discussions of intimate partner violence and abuse.]

In one of the opening scenes of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 book It Ends with Us, the dangerously charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid offers florist Lily Blossom Bloom a nugget of presumed wisdom. “There is no such thing as bad people,” he says. “We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”

It’s a jarring sentiment, particularly because the two will soon be swept up in a whirlwind romance and get married, and Ryle will become abusive towards Lily. It’s an intense plot twist relatively uncharacteristic of the romance novel genre, and which caught many readers off guard. Loosely based on her parents’ relationship, Hoover’s book follows Lily through her abusive relationship with Ryle, the difficult decisions that come with it, and the concurrent reconnection with her first love, Atlas Corrigan.

In the years that followed the book’s release, its author received a fair share of criticism for offering what some critics called a glorified depiction of intimate partner violence. Some were concerned that the book was marketed as a romance novel, which seemed to obscure the abuse at the centre of the story.

Intimate partner violence is a form of gender-based violence, encompassing a range of harmful behaviours such as emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse by a current or former spouse or partner. In Canada, more than four in 10 women have reported experiencing some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Intimate partner violence often goes unreported because of a variety of compounding factors including the risk of further abuse, stigma and lack of trust in the criminal justice system.

When the much-anticipated film adaptation of It Ends with Us premiered in theatres last month, it was no surprise that the movie was also the subject of controversy. The film stars Blake Lively, who is also a producer for the film along with her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and is the directorial debut of Justin Baldoni.

It’s been a box office hit and has earned over $242 million since it opened at the beginning of August. But despite its mainstream popularity, the film has been the subject of sustained critique, with both viewers and film critics raising questions about the sensitivities required to make and market a moving and commercially successful film about intimate partner violence in a way that keeps the needs of survivors at the forefront.

Could this movie make the world ‘a safer place’?

It didn’t take long for audiences to speculate on a rift between Lively and Baldoni, who have rarely crossed paths during the press tour despite being co-stars.

Lively and Baldoni have also taken vastly different approaches to promoting the film.

Lively has received widespread criticism for trivializing the role intimate partner violence plays in the film in her press tour, similar to Hoover’s approach to promoting the source material. “Grab your friends, wear your florals and head out to see it,” Lively says cheerfully in a promotional video on the movie’s official TikTok account.

When fielding questions about themes of domestic violence in It Ends with Us, the actress has been keen on highlighting that her character is more than the worst things she’s experienced. “What’s important about this film is that [Lily] is not just a survivor and she’s not just a victim,” she told BBC News at the film’s London premiere. “And while those are huge things to be, they’re not her identity.”

Baldoni, on the other hand, has taken a more direct approach. He’s used the press as an opportunity to shine light on resources like No More, a non-profit dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence that also served as a charitable partner for the film.

In interviews, Baldoni extends conversations about toxic masculinity and accountability, urging men to hold each other accountable in situations where harm is caused.

“I want men to stop asking the question ‘Why do women stay?’” he said on CBS Mornings. “And hopefully [the conversations around the film] can create some compassion and empathy, and make the world a safer place.”

After receiving backlash from the public, Lively shared statistics about domestic violence in the United States, including a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “Everyone deserves relationships free of domestic violence,” she wrote.

A good chunk of the film is spent on building out Lily and Ryle’s relationship. The first half feels like any other sweeping romance — it’s glossy, trying to be wittier than it is and, at times, larger than life.

The film flashes back to Lily’s relationship with her teenage love Atlas Corrigan, a sweet and curious boy who is living in an abandoned house across the street from her. Like Hoover, Lily grew up watching her father abuse her mother and hopes never to find herself in the same position.

Baldoni’s Ryle is not unlike most other romantic protagonists. He’s handsome, has a high-earning job and is at times uncomfortably persistent in pursuing Lily. He shows up unannounced at her workplace. He follows her around a party after she repeatedly tells him she’d rather be friends.

Is it troubling? Sure. Is the dialogue awfully clunky for the characters, who have been aged up over a decade from the book? Absolutely.

But I’ve grown up on early 2000s romantic comedies and Bollywood films, both of which are notorious for equating stalking with romance, so the tropes, if problematic, seemed familiar.

Baldoni said in an interview with Today that it was important for him not to play Ryle as a villain at first, because many abusers don’t present themselves that way in the early stages of a relationship.

What are initially brushed off as sweet declarations of interest gradually result in Ryle violating Lily’s boundaries throughout their relationship.

Initially, the film suggests that each instance of Ryle’s physically abusive behaviour was a genuine accident. But the plot twist arrives when the couple reaches a boiling point: Lily realizes that Ryle’s assurances of love were false and he has, in fact, been abusive towards her.

It’s upsetting to watch unfold onscreen. There are moments when Lily is so confident in her recollection of experiences of abuse as an accident, like when Ryle strikes her after burning his hand on a hot dish. He spends time clinging to her, insisting that his account is how it all truly happened. The flashbacks to Lily’s altered recollections are ways of depicting the complex impact of trauma on memory for survivors.

Lily runs into Atlas in Boston, where they both live. Suspecting Ryle may be abusive towards her, Atlas confronts Lily and is adamant that she leave. When she begins to realize the extent of harm that Ryle has caused her, she seeks refuge with Atlas and then finds out she is pregnant, and that Ryle is the father.

It takes some time for Lily to figure out how to proceed from here. She tries maintaining some contact with Ryle throughout her pregnancy, mostly leaning on her mother for support. In one of the final moments of the film, Ryle is holding their newborn while Lily tells him she wants a divorce. Taylor Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” swells in the background. He accepts gently and leaves her with their child.

“It ends with us,” she whispers to her baby.

In a post-#MeToo Hollywood, why make this movie?

Following its release, many survivors of intimate partner violence have expressed that they have found resonance in the film. For some, it’s helped them recognize cycles of abuse in their own lives, which is a painful and beautiful thing.

To its credit, and despite the lingering corniness of its source material, there are things that It Ends with Us gets right. The film refrains from being gratuitous in its depictions of violence and takes care in building out Lily’s character beyond her abusive relationship.

In one of my favourite scenes in the film, Lily opens up to her best friend, and coincidentally Ryle’s sister, Allysa, played by Jenny Slate, about the abuse she’s experienced. Lily is on edge telling her, unsure of how her friend may react. Allysa is warm and supportive, urging her to walk away from Ryle once and for all.

But making and marketing a film about intimate partner violence, particularly in a post-#MeToo Hollywood, requires a sense of palpable care, consideration and awareness that wasn’t entirely present in It Ends with Us.

For a film so concerned with cycles of abuse and how to end them, it does little to meaningfully interrogate where these cycles of abuse originated. It oversimplifies the process of leaving.

The writing feels unnatural and fails to consider how Ryle’s power and privilege play a broader role in the relationship. Glaringly, for a film made in 2024, it feels disappointing to see a film that employs a sort of saviour complex through Atlas, who provides a vehicle out of the relationship for Lily, as opposed to offering more time for Lily’s internal processes and for her to engage her own autonomy.

To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of Lily as a character. It’s an ongoing problem that survivors of abuse are scrutinized for the decisions they make. There is no right way to leave an abusive relationship, and suggesting that there is one unfairly places the burden of resolving the hurt on the person experiencing abuse rather than the person who does harm.

But when blockbuster attempts to capture the complexity of abusive relationships miss the mark, they run the risk of presenting a one-dimensional depiction of cycles of abuse. Hollywood, in this way, seems like the wrong place to meaningfully address the structural conditions that so often prevent real-life survivors from getting the support they need and deserve.

I wonder what it would take for celebrity production teams to learn and act on the work that local organizations specializing in addressing and preventing sexual assault and intimate partner violence do every day. If they could, It Ends with Us would be a different film.

With the smoke and mirrors that seems to be an ongoing celebrity feud between Lively and Baldoni, it seems we’ve gotten further away from emphasizing the many structural and systemic ways that public systems fail survivors.

It Ends with Us is disappointing because that should have been the point all along.