IT ENDS WITH US (2024)
“We break the pattern before the pattern breaks us…”
Director: Justin Baldoni
Writer: Christy Hall, based on the novel by Colleen Hoover
Cinematography: Barry Peterson
Editors: Oona Flaherty, Robb Sullivan
Music: Duncan Blickenstaff, Rob Simonsen
Notable Cast: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Isabela Ferrer, Alex Neustaedter, Kevin McKidd
You’ve heard of this new genre they’re calling elevated horror? This flick we’re here to discuss today is also a new genre.
Elevated Lifetime.
That’s all this movie is, a very pretty looking, slightly better directed and performed version of the cliché Lifetime Movie of the Week, which almost always dealt with a wife or girlfriend with abuse issues and/or a murderous partner.
It has all the trappings of those Lifetime movies as well. Sets designed to within an inch of their life, pretty people (not Jenny Slate, who my sister honestly thought was a dude in a dress) in good shape who never seem to work out, who live in gigantic apartments, with goofy friends who suddenly turn serious in the third act, black and white characterizations to make the moralizing easy to digest (woman good, man bad)… you get the picture.
But this flick has a veneer that separates it from those flicks. This one is actually watchable, and eschews some of the cheesiness and schlock shocks those made for TV films seem to indulge in, though by the end, it relates the same exact messages as those inferior TV movies, and wraps everything up in a nice bow that is about as realistic as a pink elephant.
But I finished it, which is something. Even more shocking, I haven’t been able to get the film out of my mind for some reason. Maybe it’s the fact Baldoni looks like an emaciated version of my college roommate, Gianni?
Or my wondering why Blake Lively never got that disgusting berry lasered off her face despite massive plastic surgery to fix her ugly mug, or how they applied a fake berry to the actress playing young Blake… who knows.
But it stuck with me. Despite not being very good at all. Which is odd. I mean, I do love a good romantic drama, but I’m more of a Leaving Las Vegas kind of romantic, not so much a The Notebook kind.
I like my shit dark and lurid, not overlit with everyone looking like they just came from the hair salon or a modeling shoot.
Let’s take a look at the opening 5 and see if it was indicative of the film as a whole.
1ST 5 MINUTES
Of course it is!
These movies are not made to surprise or challenge you, they are made to satiate, which is why they are anti-art. Which isn’t to say they’re all bad, but they’re not art. Art is not supposed to give you a hug, it’s supposed to slap you across the face and grab you by your shirt collar. And I suppose, to a certain type of viewer, this film accomplishes that.
Those viewers are wrong.
Like nearly every other Lifetime movie (“hey, SBD, how do you know so much about Lifetime movies?” I’m a masochist, I suppose. I set my YouTubeTV to record Lifetime movies, Hallmark movies, The Golden Girls, shit like that. Though I shouldn’t lump Golden Girls in there, that show is actually funny when it doesn’t indulge in dramatics. The only chink in the armor is my wife. She doesn’t seek out these movies, but once we start, she wants to finish, whereas I just want to sample the shittiness. Sometimes I actually have to sit through THE WHOLE THING, making me a bit of an armchair expert in the genre), this flick starts with an aerial shot of a car driving through some cozy looking Northeastern town in Autumn.
Cut to an old, green Mercedes in PERFECT shape (of course the main character drives a quirky car as a substitute for character development) pulling up to a picture perfect suburban house (gee, I wonder if this perfect house holds some not so perfect secrets?!?).
The driver is revealed to be the aforementioned berried Blake Lively (you think Ryan Reynolds nibbles on and licks the berry? If he opens his eyes while kissing her, does the berry look enormous? Enquiring minds want to know!), playing Lily Bloom, who looks somewhat anxious as her mother waves from the front door, dressed in all black. All of this is set to awful, awful fucking music. It’s the kind of shit they play when you’re on hold with customer service.
So bad.
And SO this genre.
As is the whole “girl’s father dies and she comes home to discover blah blah FUCKING blah!”
There’s some comment by the mom about flowers, which Lively corrects her (ooh, character development! She knows about flowers, I wonder if that will come into play later…) as she heads upstairs (in a multi-million dollar house. Can’t have characters in these movies be poor!) to her old childhood room, which is, OF FUCKING COURSE, production designed to within an inch of its life.
Chicks LOVE this kinda shit, but the only people who have bedrooms that look like this are characters in shit movies like this. It’s SO stupid. Fake. Utter bullshit. Complete artifice.
She starts looking around her room, comes upon a carved wooden heart that she seems to cherish, and her mother appears again to tell her that her father loved her. BARF! Amazing that people write this kind of slop with a straight face.
The mom asks her how the eulogy for the old man is coming. And it’s clear Lively has not written a word, to which her mother says just come up with 5 things you loved about him, as we segue into the actual funeral.
Lily is called up to say something about her father, and as she pauses, we see on her little napkin the numbers 1 through 5 listed as bullets, but nothing written next to them. She can’t think of one thing she has loved about her father.
Ugh.
Chicks with daddy issues. HOW ORIGINAL! Can we have a Bechdel test for this kinda shit?
And what is with the outfits they put Lively in? Check out how frumpy she looks here. Maybe meant to be a shorthand substitute for character development, but she looks horrendous. And not horrendous in the “my father just died” way, but in the “wow she looks really big, why would she wear something that makes her look so fucking big” way. She has this long, black leather trenchcoat that makes her look like a shitty bargain basement Batman villain. It’s so odd.
And that wraps up the 1ST 5 of It Ends With Us. I would 100% take this shit off right now. Nothing here tells me this is going to be any different from a Lifetime or Hallmark movie, just with slightly better production values.
But for you, my friends, I suffer.
I suffer.
The rest of the flick
And suffer I did!
I don’t want to overstate how bad the movie is, cause it’s actually not terrible. It’s not good, but it’s not exactly bad either.
It’s middling.
There’s a couple of nicely written and performed scenes, but for the most part this follows all the usual beats of the genre it sits squarely and firmly in.
After she walks out of her father’s funeral, she drives to… Boston? Sure, why not. She stops her car and gazes at the building in front of her, looks up toward its roof. Cut to her sitting on the ledge of that very roof, wearing some denim jumpsuit that continues to make her look like absolute dog shit.
This is where we get the first scene that is slightly elevated from the usual Lifetime shit. It’s the “meet cute” between our two leads, Lively, and director Justin Baldoni, essaying the role of Ryle Kincaid. Jesus Christ, again with these fucking names! Does this guy LOOK like a fucking Kincaid? He’s either deeply Italian or Greek or Middle Eastern going by his looks, but a Kincaid he is not. And then they cast Jenny Slate to play his sister! At least Lily laughs at Ryle’s name, and accuses him of making it up.
The writing here is pretty sharp, and it’s a nicely performed scene, even if the characters indulge a bit too much in the “always having the exact right, witty, sharp, sarcastic comeback” nonsense this genre loves. But at least it is relatively snappy.
Hey, it’s a low bar. Sue me.
Through a series of contrivances and coincidences, these two end up an item. The particulars aren’t necessary cause they don’t really matter. But just to show how dumb: the building Lily was on the roof of is not her building, it was random. And the dude she met, Ryle, who she’d normally never see again, his sister just happens to get a job at Lily’s new flower shop and is suddenly Lily’s best friend after a day.
And speaking of the flower shop, it’s INSANE that Lily could afford to deck this place out the way she does with ZERO explanation as to where she got her money from. Nothing is mentioned about the father (who it turns out was abusive toward the mother) leaving her money, and it seems this was already in process before he died.
And it’s not just any flower shop, it’s a flower shop in an Elevated Lifetime movie, so of course it is production designed to death, every nook and cranny filled with all manner of shit.
As my Jewish grandma would say, it’s really ungapatchka.
This story is then intercut with various flashbacks to Lily as a 17 year old (the actress they got looks NOTHING like Lively, it’s so distracting), where she ends up losing her virginity to a homeless boy who shacks up in the abandoned house next door.
Ok…
This story is fine as far as it goes, but it’s meaningless. The boy is just a cipher, he’s not a real person with his own wants and desires, he’s merely a vehicle for our main character’s emotional arc. And his name is fucking Atlas! What is it with chick lit and these bizarro fucking names?
The problem with this flashback story is that it is half baked and served cold. There’s no real arc to this story. She meets him, he’s nice, they end up fucking, her father finds out and beats the living shit out of the kid. We see him with half a face of chopped meat being loaded into an ambulance and that’s the LAST we hear of him until he pops up at the most precipitous time, and still just a cipher for our main character, as he is single (of course) and pining away for her (but now he's a hot chef who owns his own successful restaurant, of course, because no chick wants a guy just scraping by, no, they want the uber successful good looking dude who just so happens to be awesome in every way AND single).
And now, he’s just waiting for Lively to get pregnant by another man and break up with that baby’s father, so he can marry her and raise some other dude’s kid. I love how in flicks like this, the simp always wins, but in real life, chicks almost always hate dudes that just wait around for them like this.
The basic gist of this flick is that Lily’s father was abusive, and now she’s in a relationship with Ryle, a neurosurgeon (first tip off that the guy is a psycho. Has anyone ever met a non-psychotic neurosurgeon? I mean, these people cut open heads and brains for a living!), who at first doesn’t necessarily seem abusive, in one of the film’s “nicer” touches.
You see, there’s two scenes where Ryle injures Lily, but the way it is cut when we first see it, it’s ambiguous, especially the first one, where the audience is led to believe Lily gets hit in the face because Ryle jerked his hand away from a hot pan in the oven as she was trying to help.
This immediately triggers past traumatic memories for her of the old man’s abuse, despite this appearing to be an accident.
The second instance, where Lily falls down a flight of stairs, is slightly less ambiguous, but still could be chalked up to an accident, despite Ryle’s rage at finding Atlas’ number tucked away in Lily’s phone case (in another glaringly obvious set up from a few scenes earlier).
The third instance of abuse is Ryle raping Lily, in one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve ever sat through. Yes, while this is not as upsetting as the rape in Irreversible, this is upsetting in a different way, as it is not some stranger raping you in a subway tunnel, but your own husband! The way Lily keeps telling him “I love you, please stop, please stop, I love you” while imploring him to just look her in the eyes so he can come to his senses, is extremely gut wrenching. It feels very realistic. Very difficult to watch this play out.
You briefly forget you’re watching actors on a screen. They feel like real people going through some real serious shit. Kudos to the actors here, especially Lively, who I normally loathe.
I also like how we eventually see, in a Rashomon-esque flashback, there was no ambiguity and Ryle did indeed punch her and toss her down the stairs in a rage, and it was merely her good heartedness that tried to see those actions in a positive light.
But then the Lifetime shit rears its head again, as it is compelled to in movies like this. Lily finds out she is pregnant by Ryle, and of course keeps the baby (abortion is a big NO NO in flicks like this, they ALWAYS keep the baby, which is weird, because the main audience for this cattle slop loves all that “reproductive rights” and “shout your abortion” shit).
It’s notable that even in a teen comedy like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, they don’t pussy out and shy away from the abortion issue, and even show poor Jennifer Jason Leigh getting the procedure done!
That was the 80s though, where filmmakers took more risks. Movies like It Ends With Us are anti-risk. While giving lip service to whole girl boss bullshit, at the end of the day these movies are very conservative, and as a result, pretty bad.
At the baby’s birth, Lily asks Ryle for a divorce, right after telling him that she will name their daughter after his dead brother, Emerson (backstory is when Ryle was 6, he accidentally shot his brother’s head off, in another Lifetime-y twist. What’s interesting is, during their initial meeting, Ryle says he’s upset because of something that happened at the hospital, but the story he tells Lily is actually the story of him shooting and killing his brother as a kid. That’s good writing).
Lily shows an incredibly high emotional intelligence here, that I don’t feel is entirely 100% realistic, but it’s actually a nice scene, especially when he begs her to take him back.
She has a great little monologue, after handing him his new baby daughter to hold, she asks him what he’ll do when the daughter comes to him and says her boyfriend hits her, or if she says her husband pushed her down the stairs, but the hubby said it was just an accident, or what if she tells him her husband forced himself on her, but promised it wouldn’t happen again, or that the man she loved was hurting her. Lively’s acting here is quite good, as she smiles throughout this dark speech. It’s very effective.
As is Baldoni, who is silent during this, but his intense stare proves he knows she’s right. Which he confirms a moment later by saying he’d beg the daughter to leave the guy.
The title refers to Lily and her new baby. That the cycle of trauma ends with the two of them. It’s a nice thought, but the kid is already coming from a broken home, will have daddy issues cause abusive daddy is not in the home and there’s some other guy who is also daddy, but not really. The notion that this cycle of trauma ends here is laughably quaint.
I know they’re all fictional characters, but I’m really hoping that kid makes it!
The One Sheet
Terrible poster. Man, even some of the Lifetime movies have better thumbnails than this shit. A profile shot of Lively with some blurry flowers on the side? Shit tagline also. But apparently none of that shit mattered, cause the movie was a huge success.
I don’t know what it is about women liking shit like this. Why would you want to watch movies about guys who cheat on their wives, or beat their wives, or rape their wives, or murder their wives?
Why are some women obsessed with that kind of “entertainment?” Is it the happy ending they all seek? That no matter what happens, it will all turn out well in the end?
Reminds of the tidbit that women are by far the largest audience for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, despite every episode being about a woman getting super fucked up by some dude, or multiple dudes. Apparently, women love it so much because the cops always solve the case, and the woman is avenged.
Women like to think there are protectors out there who will swoop in at their most dire hour. They simultaneously “don’t need no man” and desperately want a man to save them. “The biology” running up against “the society.”
A tale as old as time.
Like all these flicks, they’re just carbon copies of each other with little details changed here and there, but it’s all the same basic movie. It Ends With Us is definitely an elevated version, but elevated shit is still shit.
And the shittiness is evident from the first frame of celluloid with that awful muzak and cliché opening aerial shot.
Trust your instincts.
See you in two vomitous face berries…