Following the New York premiere of It Ends With Us on Tuesday evening, the first reviews of the film from critics have been coming in, and they’ve been decidedly mixed.
The romantic drama, based on Colleen Hoover‘s 2016 best-selling novel of the same name, was directed by Justin Baldoni (who also plays Ryle). The film follows Lily (Blake Lively) as she overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life. But after getting romantically involved with neurosurgeon Ryle, she sees sides of him that remind her of her parents’ abusive relationship. And when someone from her past, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), reenters her life, it complicates things even more and Lily must learn to rely on her own strength to move forward.
The film has previously faced criticism for its depiction of domestic violence, with some fans claiming it romanticizes the subject. However, a common theme among the early reviews is that while the movie adaptation manages to treat the topic of domestic violence with care, the narrative appears to suffer.
As of Wednesday afternoon, It Ends With Us had a score of 59 percent from 39 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and clocked in at 51 percent on Metacritic from 20 reviews.
The film, from Sony Pictures, hits theaters on Friday. It also stars Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Isabela Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter.
Read on for key excerpts from some of the most prominent early reviews following the premiere of It Ends With Us.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review, “The pat treatment of these characters ultimately does a disservice to the broader themes embedded in It Ends With Us. Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.”
The Guardian‘s Benjamin Lee wrote, “It’s a plot of hackneyed soap tropes but there’s a real maturity to how it unfolds, a story of abuse that’s far less obvious than we’ve grown accustomed to, the details far knottier than some might be comfortable with. There are expected cliches but there are also many that are mercifully avoided too, the story not always conforming to type.”
“The life lessons being taught here about self-acceptance, self-love and self-worth might be a little pat and some of the darker elements could have afforded a tad more darkness, but It Ends with Us leads with heart first, everything else later,” Lee added in his review. “It’s a film of huge, sometimes hugely unsubtle, emotion but it has an effectively forceful sweep to it.”
“It Ends With Us savors the trappings of a glossy love triangle: the banter, the flirting, the turbulence, the extravagant costumes,” Amy Nicholson of The Washington Post wrote. “The movie has to cheat a bit to get at the complexity of Hoover’s book. A child of domestic abuse, Hoover writes with painful intimacy about Lily’s struggle to claw free from her past. Baldoni shifts some of that turmoil to the audience, with editors Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan cutting key scenes so that, like Lily, we don’t know what to believe.”
Nicholson added that “even bouncing off male leads who are more pinball bumpers than dimensional characters,” Lively gave a “great performance as a headstrong, sensible woman who struggles to consider herself a victim.”
Critic Mark Kennedy wrote in his review for the Associated Press that “the uneven movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling 2016 novel” tries to “balance the realities of domestic violence inside a rom-com and a female-empowerment movie. All suffer in the process.”
“It veers too close to melodrama, with suicide, homelessness, generational trauma, child murder, unintended pregnancy and never-forgotten love all touched on and only half digested,” Kennedy continued. “Set in Boston, it never even pulls from that city’s flavor.”
Time film critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “The movie is accurate and effective in this sense: for so many abused women, you never know how bad it can get, until it gets really bad. Yet none of that is enough to make you fully buy what the movie’s selling.”
“The problem, maybe, is that It Ends With Us is all about what it’s about, and nothing more,” she added. “These characters exist to make points about the insidiousness of domestic violence, the way its effects can creep up invisibly even as those who are suffering cloak themselves in protective denial. Admittedly, that’s a lot for a movie to carry. But movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving.”
Proma Khosla wrote for IndieWire that the film “manages to sensitively handle its delicate subject matter, though largely at the cost of a more intricate narrative.”
“It Ends with Us does what it wants to (and what made Hoover’s book such a smash hit), highlighting the patterns of abuse, trauma, and silence at play in this specific story,” Khosla added in her review. “Baldoni and Hall handle Lily and everyone around her with empathy, downplaying unpleasantness or oversimplifying story elements ultimately to mitigate risk and protect viewers — with the opportunity to dig deeper in a potential sequel.”
Esther Zuckerman wrote in her review for Rolling Stone, “The movie is as frothy as it is melodramatic; as much concerned with romance as it is with trauma. Throughout its over-two-hour run time, It Ends With Us stays incredibly loyal to its beach-read, airport-paperback origins. The result is a mix of tones that doesn’t always work, but often feels like a throwback to a different era of movie-making, one where the mid-budget movie willing to delve into issues was a viable business model. (Think: White Oleander, Where the Heart Is.) In that way, it’s a successful endeavor, even if it at times may have some schmaltz-allergic audience members rolling their eyes at the emotional roller coaster of the plot.”