Review: It Ends With Us

A dumb man tries to make sense of a chick flick.

To say that I am the wrong person to review a film like It Ends With Us would be an understatement of crushingly hilarious proportions.

I like movies where things blow up, and where people jump out of helicopters. I like cops, and soldiers, and spies, and I like it when they blow things up while jumping out of helicopters.

Trashy romance yarns are, to me, what the kinds of movies I watch are to my wife. Asking me to evaluate one is like asking an aardvark to critique Hamlet.

But the stars of this one are suing each other, and the real life drama is getting intensely juicy. Especially since the launch of Justin Baldoni’s website, casting Blake Lively’s allegations about him under serious suspicion, spit is hitting fans all around. I’ve already written about this once, will be doing so again, and so I decided that I should probably check out the film at the center of the saga, if only to avoid seeming ignorant in my future check-ins.

No surprises: I hated It Ends With Us every bit as much as I expected I would. But I’m glad I watched it, because if nothing else, it gave me the opportunity to write about it. And it turned out to be a much more interesting subject than I’d ever have predicted going in.

It Ends With Us was not made for me. I am not a member of its target audience. I am in no way trying to yuck anyone’s yum here, or hold myself up as a superior art consumer to the folks who like books and movies like It Ends With Us. I would have no leg to stand on at all in doing that.

I mean, my favorite movie is Armageddon, just to give you an idea. I do not have champagne tastes. I don’t even have sparkling wine tastes. More like rot-gut vodka and grape juice tastes.

When I’m watching something I intensely hate though, I like to try and figure out why I’m intensely hating it. No, romance isn’t really my genre, but there are any number of its entries that I love. Why wasn’t this one of them?

I like the category’s usual suspects: When Harry Met Sally, Bridget Jones, anything by Richard Curtis. All of those are comedies which It Ends With Us is definitely not. But I don’t think that’s the thing. One of the reasons I bummed out so hard to It Ends With Us is that it served as a painful reminder of another popular movie I watched for the first time this year, and that I also intensely hated: The Holiday.

The Holiday is a comedy. A terrible one, that I hated it and that sucks, but a comedy still. It made me chuckle a bit. But that didn’t make my viewing experience any less unpleasant. Which is what makes me think that the low number of yucks on offer was not my only problem with It Ends With Us.

The Holiday had been billed to me as a cute, funny romp in the vein of Notting Hill or Love Actually, and it does nod to the overall vibe of those two classics. In fact, what drew my attention to it was that I had seen it suggested as a less problematic and troubling alternative to Love Actually.

It was supposed to be a kind of an antidote for viewers who share the concerns articulated in Lindy West’s hilarious takedown of the Richard Curtis love collage. Despite my furious disagreement with almost every word of it, West’s piece is awesome, and something I reread almost as often as I rewatch Love Actually. So yeah, The Holiday was supposed to be like Love Actually, but Good, Actually.

But it Actually wasn’t. Actually, it was just bad. But let’s get back on track.

***MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS***

For both It Ends With Us and The Holiday.

Also for the Bridget Jones movies, any film in which the lead is a cute, British fuddy-duddy, or romance flicks where stuff blows up and falls out of helicopters.

Off we go.

It Ends With Us is a story about Lily Bloom (Blake Lively). Lily is wonderful. Kind of perfect, actually. Battle-scarred but plucky, she instantly captivates us with her grace, her sharp wit, and the haunting suggestion that there might be so, so much more to this girl.

Lily has a problem though. Of course she does. We wouldn’t have a movie about her if she didn’t. All heroes need problems. But Lily’s problem isn’t a problem like the problems you or I might face. It’s not a problem like the ones dealt with by other date-movie main characters.

If you think about it, almost every one of those has the same, basic story: middleweight loser craves love, sucks at finding it, ultimately gets there. Extra points if they’re punching outside their class: the hapless bookstore owner falls for the movie star; the hot-mess TV presenter juggles dashing scoundrels; whatever probably happened in Maid In Manhattan. Same basic thing, all around.

It Ends With Us and The Holiday take a slightly different approach though. They’re different kinds of romance stories.

Lily’s problem in It Ends With Us - which is a problem we also see in The Holiday - is that too many impossibly hot men can’t live without her. That’s really it. That’s the whole movie. Lily doesn’t have to work for these guys - they fairly well fall into her lap. She just has to pick.

It Ends With Us isn’t a chase story. It isn’t really any kind of story. It’s more just a sequence. The decision about which hot man to pick isn’t a feature of Lily’s life, it’s almost her whole life.

Her choice, at every turn, is whether to spend the next chapter with the hot guy who’s Bad For Her or with the hot guy who’s Good For Her. No other considerations, about anything, are even nodded to in the story. Lily’s journey is a steady march from important relationship revelation to important relationship revelation. If anything is happening on the stretches between these milestones, we never see it.

It might be tempting to accuse Bridget Jones of having the same, shallow problem, but this temptation would be misguided.

Yes, Bridget is mostly torn between two insanely hot men. But insanely hot men are not her only foible. Bridget has an actual life. She has funny friends, dysfunctional parents, a rocky professional track, and an unfortunate propensity to drink and smoke too much. It all adds up to a richness and fullness of underdog character that’s just never really operative for the players in It Ends With Us.

The men in It Ends With Us have problems too. Sort of. It’s more like, problem (singular). The two main suitors have the same one: hopeless, undying love for Lily.

In both cases, the moment these men meet Lily, they are instantly robbed of any agency, and of any other orientation in life. They become automatons, whose only reason for existing is to feel intense feelings for Lily. They’re called Ryle and Atlas (which are apparently names) and they’re mostly identical, but for a few differences.

One difference is their looks. Both are super hot - don’t you worry about that - but they’re super hot in different ways. Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) is sort of windswept and sundrenched. He radiates vulnerability. Probably, there are some wounds in his past. Ryle (Justin Baldoni) is pure dark and smoky. He screams high-flyer. Ryle is fast cars, big muscles, and lots and lots and lots of women. Both appear to have wandered into our story directly off the cover of a pulp romance novel, both will forget every other thing in life after meeting Lily, and only one meaningful trait will differentiate them.

But that’s for later.

Lily’s problem is going to be that these two men cannot resist her, and that she will have to choose one. Every last plot point, conflict, or encounter in the whole film is only in the film to help Lily decide. The characters in this movie talk only to each other, and only about each other. Nothing exists for them beyond their relationships to the film’s other characters. It gets kind of weird.

You could set It Ends With Us anywhere. It’s supposed to be in Boston, I think, but it might be wherever: New York, LA, London, a refugee camp in Afghanistan, the moon. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing happens to anyone that isn’t just a presentation of the next piece of information they need to evaluate their relationships. These characters are alive for no other reason than to interact with each other. And they have no interests, challenges, or higher callings that do anything but serve these interactions.

Not a single scene in It Ends With Us is mundane. There is no mundanity in this universe. No dramaless day-to-day. The couples don’t fall asleep together on the couch, or fight over the remote. They don’t read the newspaper or forget anniversaries. They don’t work (okay, they technically do, but also they don’t). They don’t inspect each other’s moles, or have to smell each other’s bowel movements, or argue over which one of them misplaced the nail clippers.

There’s nothing real or human about these relationships at all. They’re just a series of object lessons in how to tell the difference between a hot man that is Good For You and a hot man that is Bad For You.

I realize I’m missing the point. I realize that this film was not written for me. I’m only emphasizing this dimension because the film’s unrelenting focus on Lily’s quest - choosing the better hot guy - ends up making Lily sort of a non-entity. On paper, Lily cares about other things (we’re coming to them). But what we’ll learn about these things is that they do not actually matter independent of their relevance to Lily’s choosing which set of arms should hold her on a given night.

Atlas enters earlier in the timeline, but Ryle is the first love interest we meet. And holy moly, what a meet.

The Holiday introduced audiences to a niche piece of Hollywood jargon: the “meet-cute.” In the film, the term is explained to Kate Winslet by a sweet, elderly man she collects, and whose life she is somehow able to fix inside two weeks.

See, the elderly man turns out to be a cynical, aging screenwriter from Hollywood’s Golden Age who offers Kate life lessons draped in Tinseltown nostalgia. Kate rescues him, in much the same way that Lily will rescue each of the hot, broken men bashing down her door. It’s not romantic for Kate, it’s just profound. But in all cases, through both movies, to love someone is definitionally to want to fix them.

Anyway, a “meet-cute” is an unexpected scenario that allows two characters to cross paths when otherwise, they might have just drifted by. The hot woman gets pulled over by the hot cop and sparks fly. The hot defense attorney gets assigned a hot client with a compelling past and they get close.

In Notting Hill (my fave) the meet-cute is an average joe spilling orange juice onto a Hollywood starlet and convincing her to get cleaned up at his nearby house. In porn, a meet-cute could be the bulging plumber turning up late and needing punishment from the lonely stepmom.

Our first meet-cute in It Ends With Us finds Lily decompressing on the rooftop of a building (in which she does not live), gazing dreamily at the Boston skyline, when the door bursts open and up barges…Ryle.

Ryle is angry. He’s ferocious. He’s also really, really hot. He’s in a primal rage - we don’t know why - tearing at his glorious body and violently kicking a patio chair. He doesn’t see Lily at first. Then he does.

Ryle, while obviously hot, is waving a big, red flag. This guy has a temper. He’s volatile. But why? Does something explain Ryle’s frightening passion? Should we hear him out? Is it possible that Ryle’s freaky intensity could be somehow not freaky? Could it even be…hot?

It could, it turns out!

Ryle and Lily waste no time launching into a (totally believable) discussion over the relative merits of their having sex with each other right, exactly then. But we still need to know why Ryle kicked the chair. It was probably for a Bad Reason. Unless it was for a Hot Reason… I won’t spoil this whole twist, but Ryle’s reason for kicking the chair turns out to be not just a Hot Reason but like, the Hottest Reason Ever for kicking a chair.

We will also learn in this scene that Ryle is not a “relationship guy.” He’s been around. In fact, the only kind of romantic connection Ryle has ever allowed himself to experience has been the cheap thrill of a nameless, hot woman. And given Ryle’s own off-the-charts hotness, we can presume that this guy has spent his entire romantic life going round and round the block.

Until he meets Lily, of course.

Lily is the game-changer. Ryle’s womanizing - which might otherwise be understood as a flaw - is actually a bonus. Because it makes it all the more hot and awesome when Lily is able to tame him, just by spending a few minutes being charming. Lily gets to save him from his bad old Lily-less ways.

We’re going to see this a lot: flaws not turning out to really be flaws.

The Holiday sports this trope too. Quick aside here:

When Cameron Diaz, who is perfect and put-together, and who mostly just has to choose between two hot men, winds up in rural England, she’s confronted with a problem. Here she is, just trying to get away from all the hot men (like her hot, cheating, asshole husband) and who comes late-night knocking at the door of her quaint, picturesque vacation cottage?

Jude Law.

Jude Fucking Law.

Like, the hottest and cutest English man ever (with the clear exception of Hugh Grant).

What’s Jude Law’s problem? Mostly, it’s that he just hasn’t met Cameron Diaz yet. But there’s something deeper. Something more alluring. Jude Law is guarding a dangerous secret. One that could maybe, possibly, horribly make Cameron Diaz not want to have immediate sex with him. What is it?

Guys, it’s dark. It’s terrible.

It’s…the fact that he’s a single dad to two, angelic daughters. Daughters who have nothing in life to do but sit beautifully in their 30s-era Christmas jumpers, waiting for Cameron Diaz to become their mommy.

Still though. Being a single dad is surely a flaw, right? Single dadding is hard work. Work that might, once or twice anyway, cramp the style of a man trying to fall into endless love with the American girl crashing in his sister’s house for two weeks.

Yeah no. Not a problem at all.

Jude’s kid-baggage isn’t a flaw in this story. The wrong-century babies aren’t an obstacle in Jude Law’s quest for Cameron Diaz. They’re just a plot reveal that will make Jude Law even hotter than Jude Law is already.

The kids are either useful in bolstering Jude’s hotness or they just don’t exist. They’re helpful, for example, when they’re snuggling in Jude Law’s bed with Cameron Diaz - a strange woman they’ve literally just met - and they effortlessly, tragically project their longing for Cameron to mother them. But then there’s no other side to that coin. They never get in the way. Anytime they might, they simply disappear.

Late in the movie, Jude instantly transitions from a bedtime cuddle with his kids to pounding on Cameron’s door to make sure she doesn’t go back to America without knowing how much he loves her. Where are the kids? What happened to them? Who’s watching them? It’s nighttime! Did Jude just dip out and leave them in bed with their unimaginably cute Christmas jumpers?

Doesn’t matter. We never learn. Grandma helps out, we think, but there’s no conflict there either. No negotiation. Just a dark hole in which the kids can be stashed whenever necessary. Jude’s kids in The Holiday exist only to make Jude seem even hotter to Cameron, and to signal that Jude maybe needs Cameron to rescue him. And his kids.

The kids don’t need food, or water, or their pee cleaned up, or dad hugs, or an explanation of why farting is only funny in private time. They don’t need any kind of affection or attention. If we forget about them for a bit, it’s fine. They’re fine. They’re really just the cherry on top of the perfect, fully-formed life that Cameron is spoon-fed the moment she steps foot in England.

Jude’s “flaw?” His “brokenness?” Being the hottest single dad ever. To the cutest kids ever. Kids who present him with no real life challenges at all except his having to hide their existence from love interests. I guess just on the off chance that his being a perfect, beautiful dad to perfect, beautiful children could be a turnoff to…women?

Yeah…totally plausible that this would be a cockblock for him.

Back in It Ends With Us, we know, from the very second we meet him, that Ryle is capable of violence, and incapable of keeping his thingy in his pants. But these are good things, actually. Because on contact with Lily, they will become things that Lily can immediately fix. Ryle’s “flaws” really just allow Lily to become more heroic, and Ryle to become more hot.

Atlas has flaws too. And he also appears to us bearing a big, red flag: he’s homeless! Like, for real. Homeless.

Holy cow. Why is Atlas homeless? Is he homeless for the usual reasons a person becomes homeless? Is he an addict? A drunk? Mentally ill?

Or is he homeless for a different reason? Maybe even…a Hot Reason? Maybe even the Single Hottest Reason a person could ever become homeless?

Good news, y’all! He is!

As with Ryle, Atlas’s flaws aren’t really flaws. They’re sexy mysteries. Mysteries that only ever result in our regarding him as even hotter, and even harder to resist than he was before we solved them.

Atlas’s reason for being homeless isn’t just hot. It’s the thing that makes him the exact, perfect, missing piece to Lily’s life. He sees her. Because the super hot reason he became homeless perfectly patches the gravest wound Lily bears from her dark, abuse-heavy childhood.

When the movie opens, Atlas exists only in Lily’s past. We learn about their relationship through flashbacks. They were in high school for all of their story, and Lily hasn’t seen him since. Things ended between them in catastrophe and then he disappeared from Lily’s life altogether after joining the Marines (which, hot!) Point is, Atlas is The One That Got Away.

Back in the present (though only for a hot second) we’re in a lull. Atlas is no longer part of Lily’s life. And Lily’s encounter with Ryle - while tantalizingly steamy - was a one-off. They departed the rooftop that night without any hope of seeing each other again, and without having had any sex. It’s over.

Or is it?

The movie comes agonizingly close to giving us other stakes to care about at this point. Stakes that don’t involve our just wondering whose bed Lily will decide to sleep in on a given night. But for all the buildup, the film only ends up giving us a cruel tease, then slamming the lid shut.

Lily’s dream in life is to become a florist. I mean come on, Lily Bloom? Practically written in the stars. With money it’s not clear how she has, Lily decides to buy a dilapidated storefront and transform it into the manifestation of her dream. Could this be when we finally see Lily grappling with a problem other than just which dick to ride?

Yeah no. Because the very moment we encounter Lily actually getting to work on fixing up this wreck of a shop, in walks Alyssa. Lily’s new best friend. Alyssa has a problem too. Actually, she doesn’t though.

Alyssa doesn’t have a *problem* as much as she has a *mission*. Which is to become instant best friends with Lily. Literally - I’m not shortcutting this - Alyssa has walked right in off the street into Lily’s craphole, rundown storefront, because she just knew that inside, she would find her best friend, her life’s career, and her whole reason for continuing to exist in this story. And she finds all three.

Alyssa, played by the always-adorable Jenny Slate, comes to us pre-packaged as the best friend and helper a girl could ever dream of. She has money. And taste. And lots of adorable quirks. And after hiring her to work in the store and accepting her as her best friend, Lily finds that any challenges associated with opening a brand new flower shop will simply melt away.

Most dramatically, the next time Lily arrives at the storefront after taking Alyssa on board, the ruined husk has been transformed into a paradise. Overnight!

The place doesn’t even really look like a florist’s. More like the tea room of a little cottage belonging to an eccentric, country witch. It’s not clear what a person would buy in a store like this. It’s not even clear how they’d know what they were allowed to buy. Lily Bloom’s (the name, because of course) is more a gallery than a store. It doesn’t appear to actually sell flowers. More like charming objet d’art (some of which is floral-themed) and lamps that are shaped like monkeys.

Hey though. It works out. Lily’s dream has come true. And at no cost. Lily Bloom’s is a hit, even though it has nothing obviously for sale. Whatever, it’s Back Bay, so it makes sense.

Now that Lily’s professional conflict has been solved for her, her “flower” shop is freed up to serve its actual purpose: acting as a venue for Lily’s relationship progression. Because, OMG, Alyssa isn’t just some gal off the street. She turns out to be - wait for it - Ryle’s actual sister! And, right on cue, Ryle shows up!

When he innocently enters the store, only there to support his dear, sweet sis, he’s wearing a plush onesie over a muscle shirt, because why the hell wouldn’t he be? Even a hot neurosurgeon (did I mention he was a neurosurgeon?) can be dorky.

After this second meet-cute, Lily’s relationship with Ryle goes hard, hot, and heavy. At once, they’re in love. And at once, Ryle has transformed himself from a degenerate bed-hopper into Mr. Domestic. What’s he been up to in the meantime? Nothing. Literally nothing, other than pining desperately for Lily, a fact of which he informs her promptly.

From there, the story continues its point-by-point plod through Lily’s love life, and does not do one other thing besides. Even Lily’s friendship with Alyssa is just awarded to her with no effort required. It’s easy to have a best friend when the only thing you ever have to do with them is be best friends together and talk about how you’re best friends. In one frame, Alyssa is a stranger. In the next frame, she’s Lily’s bff, trusted coworker, and sister-in-law.

Because oh yeah, Lily and Ryle get married! Pretty much right away. There’s no real reason why they wouldn’t, honestly. Lily cares about nothing besides whether or not Ryle should be welcomed into her life, and Ryle cares about nothing besides Lily, because Ryle has no other reason besides Lily to exist. It’s a match made in heaven.

Or is it?

Lily and Ryle don’t really do anything as a couple apart from have serious, illuminating conversations about their relationship, and also have lots of passionate sex. Ryle isn’t even really a person at this point. He’s an enigmatic thing that wants Lily, all the time, at the exclusion of every other life concern. How’s his work going? How are his friends? How’s his stock portfolio? We don’t know. And we don’t care. Ryle has but one duty to perform: establishing himself as worthy, or not, of Lily.

And, guys, bad news: he’s not.

From the get-go, we know that Ryle is trouble. Nobody this tall, dark, and handsome could possibly be free of baggage. And Ryle’s baggage, and backstory, will turn out to be extreme (though still within a realm of tolerance that allows him to remain mostly hot). Ryle is the Wrong Guy For Lily, which we know, even if she doesn’t.

So who’s the Right Guy?

Every single, solitary thing we learn about Atlas, from the start to the finish of his story arc, serves one purpose: to underscore how perfect he is for Lily.

Atlas is exactly like Ryle, in that he exists, and has always existed, only to be a hot, viable option for Lily. But Atlas is one who’s going to have to spend most of this story unfairly relegated to the back burner. He has an origin story. It’s pretty intense. But like Ryle’s, it only really matters insofar as it provides Lily with important information about whether or not he’s Right For Her (he is!) and whether she should be with him instead of Ryle (she should!)

The characters in this story don’t sleep. They don’t (really) work, they don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they don’t experience thoughts about things that are unrelated to Lily’s quest. They don’t even eat, unless their eating is informative for Lily.

Which it is, when Lily’s new prefab family meets up at a hot, new restaurant owned by…OMG!...Atlas.

What’s Atlas been up to since last we saw him? Same thing Ryle was, basically. He’s been wallowing in mournful sorrow over his failure to secure Lily as his life mate. Every single thing he has done since Lily last saw him - including, we’ll learn, opening a hot, new restaurant - has been actually for Lily.

I’m not exaggerating a single thing here. Lily turns out to be, for real, the literal, only reason Atlas is even alive. Atlas would, if not for Lily, have been dead before we even met him. Is this a problem? A flaw? Does this revelation lead to Lily’s emotional manipulation? Or cause her to develop an unhealthy, obligatory attachment to Atlas’s wellbeing?

Nah. It mostly just makes him hot.

When Atlas and Ryle collide, we’re going to learn something else about them. We’re going to learn that, in addition to being hot, beautifully broken, and helplessly besotted by Lily, they have another thing in common: they’re dangerous. But hot dangerous. In both cases, their danger is drawn from the same, steamy reservoir: overly intense attraction to Lily. They literally fight over her at one point. Physically. And it’s scary. But also, it’s hot.

And once we can finally size up Ryle and Atlas side-by-side, we’re directed to the one, meaningful difference between them. They’re both essentially animated by the same thing: love for Lily. But Ryle is possessive, whereas Atlas is protective. This is how we know that Atlas is Lily’s Right Guy, and Ryle is her Wrong Guy.

This has been fun, but we’re going to take a more serious turn now. And if for whatever reason, you’re going to find it upsetting to read about domestic abuse, now is when you should stop reading this piece.

Most viewers will know going in that It Ends With Us is a movie about domestic violence. To their great credit, the filmmakers partnered with professional, DV-awareness outfits like No More to ensure that any women watching this film, and finding it relatable, can be connected with people and resources to help them out of dangerous or unhealthy relationships.

I’ve been taking the piss a lot, but this feature of the film’s release is not one about which I’m going to be the least bit snarky. I’m really glad they tried to make this into something real.

I hope this movie helps people. I hope it will reach women who are in dangerous and unhealthy relationships, and inspire them to look out for themselves better. I hope abusive husbands are divorced over this movie. I hope abused women are freed. I hope that however self-serving, this piece of the film’s marketing does what it set out to do: encourage women in bad situations to get the hell out of them.

But I’m afraid that even the (very much expected) violence in this film fails the authenticity test.

It ultimately lets down women who have really had to face these situations, and for whom solutions are not often as obvious as Hollywood would like them to be.

The DV in It Ends With Us isn’t DV in the way many real victims experience it. It enters the story, signposted and obvious, as yet another device to just help Lily decide between her guys. Yes, Lily is harmed by the violence she experiences. Terribly so. But the violence - perpetrated, as we’ve predicted, right off the bat, by Ryle - doesn’t really interrupt Lily’s quest. It just lights her path.

In the movie, Lily is only physically harmed by Ryle on two or three occasions. By my reckoning, that’s two or three times too many, and the movie agrees. But it transpires in a pretty cheap way, and one that makes it impossible for me to award full credit for centering the stories of women who have actually found themselves in awful situations.

After Lily and Ryle marry, there are incidents. Disturbing ones. But mostly just confusing ones. Lily is fine one minute, then a minute later, she’s bleeding from the head. How did it happen? Who, or what, caused the bleeding? We know. But Lily doesn’t.

And actually, we don’t know. Not for sure. Because we never see it. Neither does Lily. Yeah, she’s got a black eye all of a sudden. And yeah, it appeared after some vague commotion with Ryle. But Lily remembers these incidents as accidents. The nitty gritty details have been pushed beneath her conscious mind, and off our screen.

She’s not minimizing. She’s not excusing. We never have to see Lily rationalizing, deflecting, or forgiving. Mostly because she’s never in a position where she’d have to. Lily does not have to contend with her abuse because Lily does not remember her abuse. She’s repressed it. It’s blocked.

I understand what the storytellers are trying to do here. They’re reminding us that abuse isn’t always cut and dried. It’s complicated. And it’s disorienting for victims. What are you supposed to think when a guy you love, who says he loves you too, is also hurting you? Trying to reconcile that is what leads to so many real-life victims of DV making what so many in their friend and family circles consider obviously bad decisions.

But bad decisions, like minimizing, excusing, or forgiving abuse don’t have to be made by Lily. They’re not really considerations for her, because what would even predicate them? She has injuries, yeah. But all of them were either her fault or nobody’s fault. We don’t discover the full truth of these moments until very late in the film. We don’t actually know what happened until Ryle tries to sexually assault Lily, she manages to escape, and she suddenly, finally remembers it all.

As with most of Lily’s transformations, this one is immediate: she’s a unknowing victim one minute, then a fully knowing victim the next. Ryle didn’t just grab a hot pan and accidentally elbow her. He got angry and smacked her. Lily didn’t fall down the stairs in the middle of a fight, Ryle pushed her. The minute these memories are unearthed for Lily she appropriately acts on them by leaving Ryle.

Again, I know what the film is trying to do. I get it. It’s a worthy lesson the film is teaching: some women - even smart, strong, capable ones - end up with men who hurt them. And who they let hurt them. For far longer than would seem reasonable to an outsider.

But the film never actually lets Lily be that messy. In processing her abuse, she lands somewhere on a murky spectrum between amnesia and denial. If it’s denial though, it’s denial so complete that it might as well be amnesia. We’re never honestly asked to root against the choices Lily is making, and Lily is never in danger of making any honestly bad choices. Because whatever the exact psychiatric process, the result is the same: Lily doesn’t have full access to the full facts.

I’m not saying this never happens to women in real life. I’m not in a position to do that. I don’t know. I am saying that it feels very Hollywood, and very convenient. Because it all adds up to making Lily that thing we’re always being told doesn’t really exist: the Perfect Victim.

There is a messier abuse victim in the movie: Jenny. Jenny is Lily’s mother, and she was subjected to brutal, physical torture by Lily’s father, all of which Lily had to witness. It defined her whole childhood. But here again, Jenny’s history of being smacked around is only important as an object lesson for Lily. The violence is only relevant here as far as it helps guide Lily along her quest. On its own, it doesn’t matter.

Jenny is weak, and always has been. Weak because she’s had to do all the things that Lily’s amnesia has exempted Lily from having to do; minimize, excuse, forgive, etc. Jenny having had to actually make tough, messy, wrong decisions has rendered her pathetic. They’ve rendered her a bad mother. We know she’s a bad mother because upon meeting Ryle, she can’t get enough of him, and is thus directing Lily down what we know is the wrong path. Mom is only even in this story to show us what Lily should not become. To be an anti-role model.

This is completely consistent with how the whole movie works. Most of the characters in It Ends With Us aren’t characters at all. They’re traffic wardens, shepherding Lily along on her quest of figuring out which crazily hot man should be the one she settles down with. Jenny’s abuse story is the only one in the whole film to feel real. But its realness is secondary to its true purpose which is being just another road sign for Lily.

Lily gets to be better and more heroic than Jenny because Jenny didn’t immediately do the smart thing that Lily immediately did: leave. It doesn’t count that Lily stayed with Ryle before leaving because as far as she could remember, as far as her psyche could acknowledge, she wasn’t being abused.

The repressed-memory trope really pissed me off in this film. Lily’s amnesia (/denial) is supposed to show us that women can remain in dangerous situations, sometimes without necessarily knowing what they’re doing before it’s too late. That’s true, I suppose. But this device serves another, less defensible purpose; it allows Ryle to keep being hot for the majority of the film.

If we know, for sure, that he’s hitting Lily, we can’t tolerate him. Wanting Lily to love or have sex with him under those circumstances would make us bad. And we can’t have that. Thankfully, by obscuring his abuse we get to continue wanting Lily to have these things until close to the very end. Neither Lily nor us really knows that Ryle is dangerous in ways that aren’t hot. So Lily gets to have hot, guilt-free sex with him constantly. Until he tries to rape her, at which point everything about Ryle becomes extremely not hot, and Lily’s attention can safely be turned toward Atlas.

Although - bombshell - by this point there’s another complication: a baby. Lily is pregnant. By Ryle. So that raises the stakes all around. Except no, it doesn’t. Because the baby isn’t actually a baby in this movie. Like how violence isn’t really violence. Both are just two more road signs.

Ryle’s injuring Lily isn’t your bog standard domestic violence. He never comes home angry from work and pops her one. He never gets drunk and raises a hand. She never mouths off and provokes him. Ryle’s violence is just an extension of Ryle’s only purpose in life which is to be just too insanely in love with Lily. Sometimes, he gets mad about that. Sometimes, he gets so mad about it that he hits her.

Possessive men getting violent is obviously a real phenomenon. And I’m not dinging the movie for showing us an example of it. But real-life women who have to protect themselves from these men are generally in much tighter spots than Lily, and encountering violence that can’t all be explained away by their abusers just loving them too much.

In most real cases, an abused woman finding out that she’s pregnant with her abuser’s baby would present her with a serious problem. A disastrous one, even. A flaw.

But we know by now how flaws work in It Ends With Us, and so this doesn’t happen. Like Jude Law’s kids in The Holiday, this baby is all upside. This baby is only going to spotlight the importance Lily’s getting away from Ryle, because my God, what if he ends up hurting the kid too?

Money? Custody battles? Joint care with a violent abuser? The fear of single parenting? Non-issues. Lily is still leaving Ryle, and Ryle is actually okay with it. He’s sad, sure. But he’s contritely recognized the danger he poses to Lily and just lets her go in peace. Probably, he’ll even still help out with his vast riches. So Lily gets to keep the rest of her life on course, and no part of this baby’s arrival has to be a problem. Totally normal behavior for a wife-beater, and totally normal outcome for a woman confronting an unexpected pregnancy.

It Ends With…predictability. I won’t spoil it. But honestly, would I even be able to? Has any part of this story not come out of a can? Not turned out the way it was supposed to? Is there any chance of the ending surprising us?

Obviously, the problem here is partly one of male perspective vs. female perspective.

Men who don’t look like characters in these romance movies (as, alas, I do not) have to work hard for it. We’ve gotta hustle. It takes work for us to land the dream girl.

Women, as I understand it, spend most of their lives just exhausted from having to swat away the endless barrage of dick that gets thrown at them. There’s no bridgeable gap between those vantage points.

It’s understandable, and actually believable, that an endless barrage of dick would be Lily Bloom’s biggest problem in life. That’s okay, not every great story has to be great for me. All I’m saying here is that stories that center the navigation of dick-minefields don’t totally or necessarily speak to me. Right from the jump, I’m bringing the wrong lived experience to this one.

If this kind of story is going to be your kind of story, drink it in. You’ll love it. For the genre, it hits all the right notes at all the right times. The film boasts a gorgeous cast, a gooey soundtrack, and a conundrum that most normal people would kill for the chance to untangle, even when it gets dark.

It Ends With Us and The Holiday both suck for me, mostly because I can’t readily see myself in either of them. There’s no desirable role I could occupy in either narrative. At best, I’m a sweet little loser, waiting for the story’s real main character to select me. At worst, I’m a case study for the kind of guy a woman definitely doesn't want to end up with. Both archetypes are terrible.

But It Ends With Us isn’t supposed to be a slice of life. It’s not a guidebook for navigating real relationships. It’s ultimately just a hot, trashy fantasy. And if you’re up for a hot, trashy fantasy, you almost couldn’t do better than this one. I’m dunking on it, but all I’m really doing is being the guy who can’t get into Game of Thrones because “dragons don’t actually exist.”

Anyway well done to the cast and crew of In Ends With Us. Experienced and new, all did awesome, spot-on work. They made exactly what they set out to make, and deserve praise for their efforts.

Even Blake Lively, who I’m starting to think might be evil.