If you’ve so much as glanced around an airport terminal recently, you’ve probably seen the name Colleen Hoover. Since the start of the pandemic, Hoover and her dedicated readers have reconfigured the publishing landscape: The author, who has nearly 4.5 million followers across her social-media platforms, is far and away the most prominent author on BookTok, the industry-shaping literary corner of TikTok, where “CoHo” is discussed with the enthusiasm generally reserved for A-list musicians. Thanks largely to the digital evangelism of the “CoHort,” eight of the 25 highest-selling print titles of 2022 (and four on the 2023 list) were Hoover novels.
Now a film adaptation of It Ends With Us may project Hoover’s most popular novel—and her broader oeuvre—into a new tier of recognizability, much like prior screen adaptations did for reader-driven sensations such as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. Originally published in 2016, Hoover’s book follows a young woman named Lily Blossom Bloom, who is on the precipice of realizing her lifelong dream to open a flower shop. After the death of her father, who abused her mother throughout her childhood, Lily begins dating an attractive, enigmatic neurosurgeon named Ryle—and when Ryle becomes violent toward her, Lily faces a series of difficult choices in her agonizing quest to break the cycle of abuse. Led by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, the new film refracts this coming-of-age tale through the glossy lens of a big-budget Hollywood production soundtracked by Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. But the result is a disjointed project that highlights the shortcomings of Hoover’s dull approach to character-driven storytelling and social commentary.
As a visual work, It Ends With Us magnifies the contradictions (and, in rare moments, the pleasures) of its source material. Hoover’s book, with its pink-and-violet cover, is often marketed as a romance novel—or at least recommended as one by the CoHort, many of whom are young women or teenagers. For Gen Zers, who have spent their formative years living through a series of overlapping global crises, the predictably banal turmoil in Hoover’s books can offer a much-needed emotional release: “I feel like we all just want to feel something so badly,” one college student said in a 2022 Washington Post article about TikTokers who record themselves crying while they read Hoover’s work. Like Hoover’s other stories of romance, suffering, and redemption, It Ends With Us—both the book and the film—begins with a vision of all-consuming infatuation: Ryle (Justin Baldoni) and Lily (Lively) first meet on the roof of his high-rise building, where they exchange “naked truths” about their lives. After Lily laments not giving a proper eulogy for her father, Ryle consoles her with a mantra that recurs three more times in the book: “There is no such thing as bad people,” he tells her. “We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”
Early in the film, Baldoni imbues Ryle with energizing humor and charisma, making the initial connection with Lily feel less like projection from a bereaved young woman onto a hot, brooding stranger. The self-described commitment-phobe Ryle quickly declares his love for Lily, and by the time he proposes, Ryle has seemingly undergone a classic romance-trope conversion: The alluring Lothario has found the one woman capable of opening him up to love. Following their initial honeymoon phase, Ryle’s abuse might come as a “plot twist.” But It Ends With Us isn’t really about love—it’s about intimate-partner violence, as Hoover has said. On-screen, the second-act shift is meant to convey the idea that an abuser can come in all forms. Baldoni, who also directed the movie, said he viewed Ryle not as “a mustache-twirling bad guy” but “a guy with deep pain and deep trauma who makes terrible decisions that are never acceptable or excusable in any situation.”
Despite its stated interest in addressing generational cycles of abuse, It Ends With Us doesn’t spend much time exploring the roots of Ryle’s intense familial trauma—or even Lily’s. Instead, the film periodically zooms out to introduce some levity through his sister and brother-in-law (respectively played by Jenny Slate and Hasan Minhaj, who both seem out of place in the soapy mess). The erratic storytelling undermines the serious issue at its core: It Ends With Us is strikingly myopic in framing the central conflict as a marital rift, ignoring the fact that divorce alone may not keep Lily safe from Ryle, a wealthy, respected surgeon with institutional support.
Lily’s feelings about Ryle are also interrupted by Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), a former teenage boyfriend with whom she reunites in the present. Atlas, who was homeless when they met and now owns a popular restaurant, quickly becomes Lily’s white knight. It’s one of the most common tropes in romance—the old lover, here to rescue the heroine from a current crisis—but it undercuts the already didactic messaging about the gradual onset of domestic violence.
On the page, all this may scan as intense, as Hoover’s breathless prose communicates that Lily is stuck in a heady and confusing situation. But in scenes performed with miserable seriousness, Lily’s dilemma is more tortuous than liberating. Lively’s acting is particularly ill-suited to the gravity of bigger emotional scenes, which is especially noticeable when she defaults to the mischievous, flirty energy that defined her past roles. Visually, It Ends With Us jumps between warm, light-filled imagery and a gloomy, foreboding palette, sometimes within the same setting—choices that draw attention to fundamental inconsistencies in a story that can’t decide what it wants to be or whom it’s for.
Even so, It Ends With Us will have no trouble finding an audience—it’s already set to have a formidable box-office debut this weekend, and CoHo fans can look forward to at least one other upcoming film adaptation. For all the tonal confusion of Hoover’s novels, readers continue to gravitate toward the repetitive writing and heavy emphasis on shocking twists. Like the protagonists in Twilight and 50 Shades, the characters at the center of Hoover’s books tend to be young women who self-actualize by negotiating (often porous) boundaries with powerful men. To young people who have become inured to the misery of modern life, there’s a seductive premise in these novels: Relentless suffering can give way to freedom—and hot sex—if women want it badly enough. On-screen, performed by real people, it’s not as convincing.
