Review of It Ends with Us, directed by Justin Faldoni

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

In the fall of 2024, I’ve been trying something new. As I’ve entered a period where I focus on the blog, I made a conscious effort in order to try out new films, books, and shows that I never would have watched. And this, my online friends, is how I ended up watching It Ends With Us.

My disclaimer is that in general, I don’t like BookTok. Taste is so subjective and no one is wrong about liking something over another; we shouldn’t gatekeep taste. Also: you can’t complain that young women are reading all these trashy romances because even in the 1920s our grandmothers and great grandmothers were also reading trashy romances or harlequin novels.

That said, I usually refuse to pick up the major BookTok books because I know they’re not for me. I tried before, and the writing was not the greatest. The storytelling was fine, but the actual writing has not been good for what I’ve read. Hoover is one of the authors I actively avoid because I've disliked everything I read.

Anyways, I want to make an effort to diversify, so I watched the movie when it dropped on Netflix. I don’t want to keep boring you with the details of the context of getting here, so let’s get into the review and summary!

A woman from an abusive family falls into the same cycles with her own relationship.

This movie tells itself in fragments, and it’s not entirely in chronological order. I’m going to arrange this in chronological order for the sake of my sanity, as I don’t want to keep flipping back and forth.

Throughout the movie we get flashbacks to the main character, Lily, and her high school years in Maine. Her father is abusive towards her mother, that’s pretty obvious, and one day she finds out a boy named Atlas is squatting in a vacant home next door. His mother kicked him out, as she was also in abusive relationships.

When Atlas tried to stop it, she kicked him out. Slowly, Lily and Atlas become friends, and eventually she kisses him while they’re on the school bus together. They begin dating, she even loses his virginity to him, but then her father finds them together and beats Atlas to the point of sending him to the hospital. They break up after that, and he heads off for the Marines.

In the present day, Lily’s father dies. She comes home for the funeral, but is unable to say anything nice about her father. When she goes back to Boston, where she lives, she meets a neurosurgeon named Ryle on the rooftop of an apartment. He shocks up kicking chairs, which shows some issues early on, but they’re attracted to each other and flirt until he gets called for surgery.

Lily opens her own flower ship and hires Allysa, who turns out to be Ryle’s sister. At her birthday party, Lily meets Ryle again, who confesses he likes her. She spends the night at his apartment (but no sex), and they agree to date the next morning. But when she meets his mother at a restaurant called Root, turns out Atlas is the owner of the joint. They chat and he reveals he also has a girlfriend.

Ryle and Lily are making breakfast one morning when Ryle burns his hand and spills glass all over the floor. Lily tries to help him, but he hits her in the face, leaving her with a black eye, and his hand is all cut up by the glass. When they go out to eat with Allysa and her husband, Atlas notices the bruises and Ryle’s wrapped hand, confronts him, and ends up throwing them out of the restaurant.

He does come to Lily’s flower shop to make amends, then slips his phone number into her phone case. Allysa gives birth to a son, and while they’re all in the hospital room, Ryle proposes to Lily. They get married and elope, but when Ryle finds Atlas’s number in her phone case, he runs off. Lily follows him down the steps, and he pushes her.

He gaslights her and says she fell. A magazine then gives recognition to Root and Lily’s shop, but when Ryle finds out that Atlas named the restaurant after the root he carved Lily, he tries to rape her. She runs away in fear to Atlas, then he takes her to the hospital. The doctor tells her she is pregnant.

Lily decides to stay with Atlas for a bit, and he confesses Lily was the reason he didn’t kill himself. Lily also goes to meet Allysa, who says that Ryle accidentally killed their brother, which probably explains why he is so messed up now. When Lily gives birth to a daughter, she tells Ryle she wants a divorce, and he agrees.

She hopes she ended the cycle of abuse, hence the title of the movie. To heal, she goes to her father’s grave and leaves behind the blank eulogy, and when the years go by, she runs into Atlas and tells him she divorced Ryle.

Overall Thoughts

Honestly, I see why this movie has mixed reviews. I don’t think the lead up to the abuse works well for the script because it romanticizes their relationship. We needed that earlier on, lest it creates some friction with the plentiful amount of “sexy” and romance moments early on in the movie.

At the same time, I just didn’t care for these characters. I feel like this would have worked better as a small television series instead of a movie, like a 3-4 episode limited series. Allysa, for example, just exists in the background. Ryle himself is also a very static character, and dropping his backstory at the end doesn’t complicate the plot the way they think it does.

All of this is to say there are some positives. I think we do need more representation of domestic abuse. I’m not sure this movie focuses on it enough to make it a movie about domestic abuse. It does a good job in showing how a charming man can easily switch to abusive, which might be the point I’m missing.

In the end, taste is subjective. You might love this movie, and that’s okay. I might not like it as much, and that’s not okay either. I don’t think it’s a terrible movie, but it’s not a great movie either. And that’s okay too!

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