Review Detail

It Ends With Us wants to be an emotional gut punch. A raw story about breaking free from abuse and inherited trauma. Instead, it’s a clumsy, tone-deaf soap opera dressed like a fashion experiment gone wrong.

Directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Blake Lively, this adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel doesn’t understand the story it’s telling. It handles domestic violence like a marketing pitch for empowerment: safe, shiny, and emotionally hollow. You keep waiting for the movie to take itself seriously, but it’s too distracted by its own reflection.

Blake Lively’s Lily Bloom is supposed to be a woman caught between love and fear, but everything about her feels misjudged. Especially the styling, oh God, the styling. Her wardrobe is genuinely baffling: loud patterns, mismatched layers, chaotic silhouettes that scream confusion but not in the way the story intends. She looks less like a struggling florist navigating trauma and more like someone who got lost backstage at a costume fitting. It’s hard to connect with Lily’s pain when her outfits are so jarring that they pull focus from every scene she’s in.

Performance-wise, Lively seems stranded. She’s playing emotion, not feeling it. There’s a stiffness to her delivery. Almost like she’s aware of the camera, aware of the dialogue, but never fully inside the moment. It’s as if she’s trying to act grief through posture. What should be vulnerability comes off as rehearsa

Baldoni, directing himself as Ryle, fares no better. He’s far too composed to make the violence convincing and too polished to feel threatening. The story wants to explore how charm and cruelty coexist in abusive relationships, but the film flattens that tension. It’s all smooth surfaces and soft lighting, even when things should be ugly and hard to watch. The fear never sets in.

Visually, the movie looks expensive but soulless. Every argument unfolds in perfect lighting. Every dark moment is treated like a commercial. The flower shop glows like a Pinterest board while the characters crumble like cardboard. There’s no grime, no realism, no sense of danger.

And then there’s the tone, wildly uneven. One minute you’re watching a romantic montage with pop music, the next you’re meant to process generational abuse. The film tries to comfort when it should confront. 

It Ends With Us wants to say something profound about choosing yourself. Instead, it says nothing with great lighting.