Lily, a young woman as brilliant as she is charming, is about to open a flower shop in a chic neighborhood of Boston: a childhood dream. The fairy tale seems to be complete when she meets Ryle, a neurosurgeon straight out of a modeling agency. After a semblance of hesitation, Lily moves in with her lover. Alas, Ryle quickly becomes violent, which Lily only admits after a long time. But then the handsome Atlas reappears, Lily’s first love, from the time when her own mother suffered the violence of her father… Adaptation of a best-selling novel, It Ends with Us (Never again) bet on the glamour rather than on plausibility.
Visually, It Ends with Us recalls the interchangeable romances that the big digital platforms overproduce. The budget is more imposing, certainly.
The fact remains that for the most part, we are in the same kind of parallel reality where the characters are extremely and inexplicably financially comfortable, working only in theory: as proof, we have Lily’s shop, where there are never any customers, not that this prevents her from leading a luxurious and idle existence.
As mentioned, everyone is outrageously attractive, always beautifully dressed, as if permanently striking an Instagram pose in perfect settings. It’s smooth, aestheticized, artificial. In other words, nothing seems authentic. From then on, the drama seems disembodied.
In a contradictory bias, domestic violence is treated both as a suspense engine (Will he or will he not get angry? Will he or will he not hit her?), which is in itself quite nauseating, and as a “big revelation” in the style of M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense/The sixth sense ; Signs/Signs ; Trap/Trap) when Lily finally comes out of her denial, with an explanatory montage as a bonus.
Like its heroine, the film is plunged into cognitive dissonance.
Charismatic Blake Lively
Worse, the resolution is dangerously unrealistic. A heart-to-heart conversation between Lily and Ryle, and presto!, everything is settled: here is the violent man turned kitten. Granted, that was certainly not the goal, but the problem of domestic violence is trivialized.
The film does, however, benefit from a charismatic performance by the all too rare Blake Lively (The Shallows/The shallows ; A Simple Favor/A little favor). View of a young woman with a small dog in Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything everywhere all at once), Jenny Slate steals the show, however, as a rich sister-in-law who works to pass the time (that’s right, yes).
On the men’s side, Justin Baldoni, who directs, films himself with great love in the role of Ryle. In that of Atlas, Brandon Sklenar sees himself given more of a narrative function than a role properly speaking. In short: a film to forget.