On Aug. 9 the movie, “It Ends with Us” premiered. It earned $80 million worldwide at the box office during its debut weekend. The movie is Colleen Hoover’s book series brought to life, covering the sensitive topic of domestic and emotional abuse. The viewer follows a 23 year-old woman named Lily who recently lost her father and meets a man named Ryle, a neurosurgeon, on a rooftop one night. They have a provocative meeting that ends after only a couple minutes, and they don’t see each other again for a few months. By then, Lily has opened a flower shop and she hires a woman named Allysa, and Ryle turns out to be Allysa’s little brother. Soon after reconnecting, Lily and Ryle decide to start a real relationship, and not too long after get married. A series of events plays out that when first seeing them onscreen they don’t seem like a big deal. Later the viewer realizes that those moments were morphed memories that Lilly wanted to believe. She has to wake up to the reality she was living in because she didn’t want to go through what her mother had gone through Lily’s whole childhood. When Lily finally processes the reality she is in, she is sitting in the hospital, but at the same time finding out she is pregnant. While recovering from the abuse she stays with her high school boyfriend Atlas, who had promised to protect her from this exact issue when they were young and witnessed her father’s abuse. Lily ends up divorcing Ryle, and saving her and their daughter from this abuse.
The movie shines a rare light on domestic violence, which has come with an overwhelming amount of negative opinions, and backlash. Many survivors have come out after watching the movie, saying that Hoover’s story glorified domestic violence. The Brooklyn College Vanguard says that the story, (in both the movie and the book) was told from Lily’s perspective, never once stopping to give the audience a reason to see the abuse in the first part of the book and movie. The physical abuse, at first, is displayed as an accident through Lily’s eyes. Some people took this as the Hoover telling people to stay with their abusers, or go back to them, only to get put in even more harmful circumstances. The Brooklyn College Vanguard also added that there was too much explanation and understanding what was happening, rather than actually holding abusers accountable. One main criticism was issued by NPR in their review, saying the movie had made entertainment out of trauma. Even with this criticism I believe that “It Ends With Us” has brought a large community together bringing more awareness towards this issue, and has done good. Hoover created this story because she grew up around domestic violence, and makes people who have witnessed or experienced this feel seen. However, this does not mean that the people who have experienced this in real life do not have a valid point; Hollywood often takes real world issues and puts a spin on them, making them less and less real, until finally, the story isn’t about the situation the creator was trying to bring awareness to. The film industry is known for its toxicity and twisting of narratives, and sometimes it makes these real-life scenarios lose their reality. The amount of controversy that has been sparked, and the drama with co-stars has also made this piece lose the depth that it was intended to have. All of the talk about the movie has been about the issue between the cast and actor Justin Baldoni who plays Ryle, and Blake Lively’s producing of her new hair product instead of domestic violence being at the forefront, which has taken too much attention away from the important message of the movie. “It Ends With Us” was written with good intentions, but the message and harsh reality of domestic violence did get lost along the way.
