It Ends with Us  (2024)

Director/star Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel starts as a passionately romantic tale that turns into a dark cautionary tale. It suggests that even though we love someone there is a line that when crossed we dare not try to cross back over, for safety-sake.

Before the front credits we see Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) attending her father’s funeral in Plethora, Maine where she is to deliver the eulogy. Standing at the podium and saying that there are five things she wants to say about the man, we discover that on the paper on which she has written “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” there are no words after each number. Pausing briefly to look at the paper, Lily folds it back up, waits a few seconds, and walks out of the church, returning to Boston.

One night atop a a rooftop where she is sitting on the ledge, a man bursts through the door and angrily kicks a chair. He is neuro-surgeon Doctor Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), deeply upset that he has just lost a six-year-old boy patient. They become acquainted, but part shortly thereafter. Of course, we know that they will meet again. And also, that with a name like Lily Blossom, she will open an upscale flower shop. She hires Allysa (Jenny Slate) as shop assistant, and of course, Ryle is soon back in her life because he is Allysa’s brother. (Such coincidences are at the core of such romances, whether Victorian or modern!)

Interspersed throughout their budding romance are flashbacks to Lily’s highschool days when she (now played by Isabela Ferrer) sees a student sneaking into the empty house across from hers, and she leaves him a bundle of food. Grateful, he is Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), kicked out by his mother. Despite the disapproval of friends, the two become a pair, but lose touch when he joins the military.

In Boston Lily takes Ryle to meet her mother Jenny at a new restaurant called Root. What a surprise that the chef-owner is Atlas (played now by  ). They will meet again, and Ryle, now Lily’s husband, will become so jealous that his inner rage, stemming from a terrible tragedy years earlier in his family, erupts, at least twice endangering her life. She will emerge from this quagmire both a mother and a wiser woman, leading her to a difficult decision about her relationship with Ryle. And, we think, Ryle will be wiser and better for that decision.

The scene in which she visits her father’s grave with her mother and young daughter is a very moving moment, enhanced by her leaving there the note with its blank five points. Only from what Lily says to the abusive but repentant Ryle does the meaning of the film’s title take on meaning.

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