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Spoilers below for It Ends With Us, both the book and film.
There are plenty of problems with It Ends With Us—the buzzy new Colleen Hoover adaptation directed by (and starring) Justin Baldoni alongside Blake Lively—and that’s without mentioning the supposed cast drama that has TikTok up in arms. Yet the film does make improvements upon the book, often marketed as a romance but, in actuality, is a startling tale of domestic violence. Baldoni does his best to deploy important tweaks while staying loyal to the bulk of Hoover’s plot, which follows florist Lily Blossom Bloom (Lively) as she falls in love with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), who enters her life by storming onto a rooftop and kicking a “marine-grade polymer” chair across the floor. However understandable his frustration—earlier that day, he’d witnessed the death of a child—the red flags do not, sadly, disappear from there. His jealousy and anger later manifest as physical abuse, and by the time Lily realizes she’s in irreconcilable danger, she’s already married to Ryle and pregnant with his child.
For all its faults, the It Ends With Us film adaptation does eliminate one major red flag: It changes Hoover’s original ending to erase Ryle’s unearned redemption.
In the book, Lily gives birth to their daughter, Emerson, after a prolonged period away from Ryle, following his latest horrific incident of abuse: attempted rape. In the hospital room, holding Emerson, Lily tells Ryle she wants a divorce. “I look at Emerson and I look at Ryle,” Hoover writes from Lily’s perspective. “And I know that I have to do what’s best for her. For the relationship I hope she builds with her father.”
Lily convinces Ryle to agree to the divorce by making him consider whether he’d want his own daughter to remain in an abusive relationship. (How many times must we endure this rationale? Why does a man need to see his violence reflected in his daughter before he can see it reflected in his wife?) Ryle ultimately agrees to end their marriage, and Lily grants him partial custody over Emerson. Hoover writes that Lily “moved out of the apartment Ryle bought when Emerson was three months old…Ryle moved back into the apartment he bought, but between visiting Allysa’s place and Ryle’s days with Emerson, I feel like I’m still at their apartment building almost as much as I’m at mine.” The implication here is that, while co-parenting, Lily and Ryle see each other so often as to feel like they’re still living together. Hoover makes no mention of Ryle attending therapy, nor does she imply any other reform-related rationale for why Ryle would remain a constant in both Emerson and Lily’s lives. The divorce alone, it seems, is justification enough for their continued relationship.
Baldoni doesn’t allow such a logical leap. In his film adaptation, the ending depicts Lively’s Lily meeting her former love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), after divorcing Ryle. She reveals to Atlas, “It’s just the two of us,” meaning her and Emerson: Ryle is no longer in the picture.
As Baldoni explained in an interview with The Wrap, he didn’t see how Ryle could remain such a facet of Lily’s life when “the majority of men go back to being abusers, and that’s the fact.” He continued, “It didn’t feel right to tell a story about a man who was a minority in that, because that wouldn’t be honoring the original intention of why we were trying to tell the story…The best ending for Ryle was to look at his wife and kid, and the life that he could have had, the life that he blew up, and to walk out the door and for us to not see him again.”
He clarified to The Wrap that, in the script’s original draft, there was a scene in which audiences would watch Ryle dropping Emerson off with Lily. But Baldoni and the domestic-abuse support foundation No More, which provided assistance on the film, believed the scene didn’t make sense. “Too much had to be done in such a short window to explain how [Ryle and Lily] could possibly be co-parenting,” Baldoni said. “I don’t want to open up a can of worms and have a conversation about, you know, should a man like Ryle be allowed to co-parent? You know, what’s an acceptable amount of work that that someone has to do in that situation? It was just way too much.”
And it was a conversation that, in the original ending of It Ends With Us, Hoover chose not to have at all. In this sense, the film version corrects a major mistake of the book. The adaptation understands that—to parrot one of the book’s more popular refrains—not all people who do bad things are bad people. But that shouldn’t preclude them from the consequences of their bad behaviors. To many book readers, divorce alone felt like a shallow response in the wake of Ryle’s abuse. (And as writer Hannah Giorgis wrote in her review of the film for The Atlantic, even the movie “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.”)
It is soothing to consider that the people who hurt us are not, in fact, bad people. It is comforting to believe that the love we found in them was real, and that they were worthy of that love. There’s an implicit plea in these ideas: Maybe, with enough love and grace, these men who hurt can be saved. Hoover spells this desire out in her book: After Lily tells Ryle she wants a divorce for the sake of their daughter, the author writes, “In the last fifteen minutes, he lost the love of his life. In the last fifteen minutes, he became a father to a beautiful little girl. That’s what fifteen minutes can do to a person. It can destroy them. It can save them…I know he’ll thank me for this one day.”
Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps Ryle can change. Anyone can change. But it shouldn’t be Lily’s responsibility to “save” Ryle, however merciful or selfless or loving her motives. She can’t save him. That’s something Ryle must do for himself. What she can do is extricate herself completely from his circle, cutting off the risk of violence at the root, and urge Ryle to get the help he needs. That is also mercy. That is also selflessness. Negotiating porous boundaries with violent men is not the altruistic behavior Hoover’s book seems to posit, no matter how well-intentioned the Ryle redemption arc might be. Nor can such a redemption arc ring true unless the audience gets to witness Ryle’s change.
Perhaps Ryle isn’t a bad person. But he did do bad things. At least in its film version, It Ends With Us understood that—and chose to end the cycle unequivocally.
If you or a loved one is experiencing domestic violence or intimate partner violence, help is available. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), or visit www.thehotline.org. The organization NO MORE also maintains a global directory of resources for those in search of support.
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.