It Ends With Us
It Ends with Us begins with a serious subject and enormous emotional potential: the way violence can repeat itself within families, and how someone who grows up witnessing it may later find herself trapped in relationships that echo the very patterns she hoped never to repeat.
The problem is that none of it made me care.
And when a film depends almost entirely on connecting with its characters, their wounds and their decisions, that indifference is devastating.
Blake Lively plays Lily competently, but I never felt genuinely connected to her. Her past, memories, relationships and conflicts are supposed to carry the entire film, yet they left me completely cold. The same happened with Ryle and Atlas. I understood exactly what the movie wanted me to feel, but I simply did not feel it.
That turns many supposedly intense scenes into scenes that merely feel long.
The screenplay insists heavily on memories, parallels between past and present and explanations for the way Lily understands love. On paper, that structure makes sense. On screen, for me, it becomes an overemphatic and highly predictable melodrama, more interested in underlining every emotion than in allowing those emotions to emerge naturally.
The film also mixes romance, trauma and domestic violence with an extremely polished visual style, almost like an advertisement. Everything looks beautiful: the lighting, the flowers, the apartments, the clothes, the framing. That carefully designed surface created even more distance for me. There is a strange clash between the seriousness of the subject and how aesthetically attractive almost everything looks.
Justin Baldoni tries to give Ryle complexity, but the character never interested me enough for his contradictions to matter. Brandon Sklenar did not make Atlas emotionally compelling to me either. That is probably the film's greatest failure from my perspective: I understand exactly what both men are meant to represent in Lily's life, but I simply did not care what happened between any of them.
This is not because the subject is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Intimate partner violence, fear, emotional dependency and the difficulty of recognising learned patterns are extremely important subjects.
That is exactly why I expected the film to hit much harder.
Instead, I found an overlong romantic drama filled with scenes that seem determined to announce how meaningful they are without actually making me feel that meaning. Music, flashbacks and extended looks are used to load the story with emotion, but none of it worked for me.
I also felt I was watching a bestseller adaptation that was far too aware of its intended audience: attractive characters, idealised surroundings, trauma packaged as grand emotional melodrama and a narrative carefully designed to trigger specific feelings.
It triggered almost none in me.
By the end, I did not feel sadness, relief or reflection.
I felt that I had wasted my time.
A serious subject deserved characters I cared about far more.
The problem is that none of it made me care.
And when a film depends almost entirely on connecting with its characters, their wounds and their decisions, that indifference is devastating.
Blake Lively plays Lily competently, but I never felt genuinely connected to her. Her past, memories, relationships and conflicts are supposed to carry the entire film, yet they left me completely cold. The same happened with Ryle and Atlas. I understood exactly what the movie wanted me to feel, but I simply did not feel it.
That turns many supposedly intense scenes into scenes that merely feel long.
The screenplay insists heavily on memories, parallels between past and present and explanations for the way Lily understands love. On paper, that structure makes sense. On screen, for me, it becomes an overemphatic and highly predictable melodrama, more interested in underlining every emotion than in allowing those emotions to emerge naturally.
The film also mixes romance, trauma and domestic violence with an extremely polished visual style, almost like an advertisement. Everything looks beautiful: the lighting, the flowers, the apartments, the clothes, the framing. That carefully designed surface created even more distance for me. There is a strange clash between the seriousness of the subject and how aesthetically attractive almost everything looks.
Justin Baldoni tries to give Ryle complexity, but the character never interested me enough for his contradictions to matter. Brandon Sklenar did not make Atlas emotionally compelling to me either. That is probably the film's greatest failure from my perspective: I understand exactly what both men are meant to represent in Lily's life, but I simply did not care what happened between any of them.
This is not because the subject is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Intimate partner violence, fear, emotional dependency and the difficulty of recognising learned patterns are extremely important subjects.
That is exactly why I expected the film to hit much harder.
Instead, I found an overlong romantic drama filled with scenes that seem determined to announce how meaningful they are without actually making me feel that meaning. Music, flashbacks and extended looks are used to load the story with emotion, but none of it worked for me.
I also felt I was watching a bestseller adaptation that was far too aware of its intended audience: attractive characters, idealised surroundings, trauma packaged as grand emotional melodrama and a narrative carefully designed to trigger specific feelings.
It triggered almost none in me.
By the end, I did not feel sadness, relief or reflection.
I felt that I had wasted my time.
A serious subject deserved characters I cared about far more.
Mini Review: It Ends with Us begins with a serious subject and enormous emotional potential: the way violence can repeat itself within families, and how someone who grows up witnessing it may later find herself trapped in relationships that echo the very patterns she hoped never to repeat. The problem is that none of it made me care. And when a film depends almost entirely on connecting with its characters, their wounds and their decisions, that indifference...
