Consider the source. Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends with Us” is a bestselling love-and-trauma women’s fiction title built on a massive fan base. With the movie adaptation opening Friday, it’s back at #1 on the Amazon Charts after 118 weeks on the list. It has 335, 654 ratings and counting. For context, Booker Prize Longlist title Percival Everett’s “James,” considered one of the best books of 2024, has 13,105 ratings. The difference is 25 to 1.
Before this mother of all beach reads even hits the screen there is massive want-to-see for female audiences, urged on by the power of BookTok where the author is known as CoHo and her followers are her cohort. Her website overflows with merch, from signed books to heart necklaces and pendants embossed with romance novel tropes “enemies to lovers” or “small town romance” or “main character energy.”
The movie adaptation, cowritten by Hoover and Christy Hall, adopts the romantic drama’s dual timeline structure. It introduces Lily Bloom first as a grieving adult (Blake Lively, with big main character energy) with a love for Carhartt and corduroy. It slips back a decade in time, presenting her as a radiant small-town teen (Isabela Ferrer) offering her virginity to her first love, the scarred and homeless Atlas (poetic Alex Neustaedter).
From the jump, whether Bloom is a teenager in the Northeastern ‘burbs or a post-college adult establishing herself as a florist in Boston, she’s haunted by a single question. Will she become an abuse victim like her mother Jenny (Amy Morton) — or will she have the agency to end the generational trauma?
In the past, she witnesses her strapping white-collar father Andrew (Kevin McKidd) assaulting her mother on the living room sofa. This fear of the handsome man with a dark, violent side imprints on young Lily. Over 29,000 readers of the novel on Kindle have highlighted this sentence: “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”
After her father dies, Lily screws up the eulogy and sets about adulting while her shrewish mother clings. She rents a Boston store-front, takes an overstuffed scrapbook she’s been using as a vision board and sets about creating her dream business with a lot of flair and a fondness for ferns – and no men in the picture.
Lily spontaneously hires the fabulously rich fashionista Allysa (a bubbly and very welcome Jenny Slate) to help her run the store, bonding with Allysa’s husband (a charming Hasan Minhaj). Material wish fulfillment is a throughline as much as abuse, as Lily meets Allysa’s dead sexy, ripped brother Ryle (charm bomb Justin Baldoni, who also directs). He just happens to be a neurosurgeon. (Isn’t everyone?)
While all signs point to a perfect match between Lily and Ryle, there’s definitely something dead behind his dark eyes that presages trouble.
As the two grow closer, and fuse in steamy PG-13 rated sex, Atlas shrugs. After an eight-year stint in the Marines, he’s now working at a Boston restaurant called Root. He’s a beau in the sensitive hunky chef mode that has served Jeremy Allen White’s Carmen Berzatto “The Bear” so well. Atlas, now marriage material, has to stand aside – but he can’t let go when he sees Lily with a black eye and Ryle with a bandaged hand supping at one of his tables.
Will first love trump new love? To find out, we’ll have to climb a mountain of revelations and icky long-held secrets – most of them relating to a history of domestic violence or extreme childhood trauma. The escalating stakes pull viewers into the characters’ hidden lives, inspiring audible responses in the full house in which I saw the movie.
One annoying habit of the script is to present a scene of conflict as if in real time, only to revisit it later with a more dire, corrected version of the incident. This strategy may work better on the page. It irked me like mysteries that withhold information that the readers need to solve the crime – it’s a bit of a cheat.
What doesn’t cheat is the casting. Lively thoroughly embodies Lily, a flower in bloom in a world that tramples beauty. Florists, like Lily, are aware of the duality of their wares. Blossoms represent romance, true. They also represent death, not only because they’re funeral essentials but because their existence is transient.
The movie, like the book, shimmers from light to dark, trying to make sense of the interconnecting vines of love and violence. Like popular book club fiction, the romance connects with an audience yearning for strong emotions, toggling between the height of romantic love and the depth of domestic violence until the redemptive end.
“It Ends With Us” opens exclusively in theaters on Aug. 9.
