How the It Ends with Us Film Expands Upon Colleen Hoover’s Book
Spoilers for It Ends with Us, the book and the film, ahead. Content warning: This article contains discussions about domestic violence.
If you have a fondness for reading and an internet connection, chances are you’re at least passingly familiar with Colleen Hoover, the author whose romantic suspense books have taken TikTok by storm over the last few years. Perhaps the author’s best-known published work is It Ends With Us, her 2016 novel—now a major motion picture—about a young woman navigating an increasingly fraught relationship. Inspired, in part, by the author’s own parents’ marriage, Hoover’s most famous title follows young college graduate Lily Blossom Bloom as she moves to Boston to pursue her dream of opening a flower shop. Along the way, she falls for the tall, dark, and handsome Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon who just might be too good to be true.
Now in theaters, the film adaptation of It Ends With Us stars Blake Lively and director Justin Baldoni as Lily and Ryle, with Jenny Slate as Ryle’s sister, Allysa, Hasan Minhaj as Lily’s husband, Marshall, and Brandon Sklenar as Lily’s childhood friend, Atlas. For months, fans and critics alike—and there are many critics—have waited on tenterhooks to see how Baldoni’s adaptation addresses the source material, especially in regard to the story’s controversial subject matter. Now the wait is over, and the results (or my results, anyway) are in: The movie does a pretty good job, actually.
But how exactly does the film’s approach differ from the books, and what changes work best in the translation from page to screen? Ahead, let’s break it down.
The Elephant in the Room
The tricky thing about discussing It Ends With Us is that the story’s most impactful when absorbed without any foreknowledge of the plot. When Lily first meets Ryle on the rooftop of a Boston high-rise, there’s an instant spark—but Ryle prefers one-night stands and Lily is more of a relationship kind of gal, so they leave things there. Only after repeated chance encounters over the following year do they decide to take the leap, embarking on an intense love affair that swiftly consumes Lily’s entire life. Broody, passionate Ryle is the romance reader’s supposedly ideal love interest…until he starts to hurt Lily, physically and emotionally. Meanwhile, Lily’s long-lost teenage love, Atlas, resurfaces in her adopted city, providing Lily with a stark contrast to Ryle’s volatile and controlling behavior.
To be frank, the narrative simply doesn’t have the same impact if you know going into it that it’s a story about an abusive relationship. But it’s impossible to have a thorough conversation about the book or film without that knowledge: Hoover’s chosen subject matter is the lightning rod to which all the novel’s most fervent criticism is drawn. When the main topic of a debate surrounding a book centers on whether or not that book romanticizes abuse, it stands to reason that the most pressing question about the film adaptation will be how it handles the translation of that abuse from page to screen. In my opinion—and to my great relief—the film’s approach to the subject not only does a deft job of navigating that translation, but it actually improves on the book’s depiction of domestic violence. The result is a subtler and ultimately more impactful experience.
In her author’s note at the end of the book, Hoover states that her primary motivation in writing It Ends With Us was to understand why women so often stay in abusive relationships. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the novel to be particularly illuminating on that subject. I couldn’t fully understand the source of Ryle’s appeal as a love interest, and his behavior read to me as increasingly controlling even before he and Lily embarked on any official relationship. Once he began to attack her, the wrongness of his actions—and the brazenness of his efforts to manipulate Lily into forgiving him—jumped off the page.
That’s not so much the case with movie Ryle. As played by Baldoni, Ryle isn’t simply devastatingly attractive; he is also clever and charming. Even in his prickliest moments of misanthropy, there is a warmth to the character that makes it instantly apparent why people would gravitate toward him. And getting to witness the explosive chemistry between Ryle and Lively’s Lily with my own two eyes—well, that certainly helped me understand his appeal.
More striking, however, was the film’s approach to depicting the moments of physical abuse. In the book, these instances are clearly described, but the movie hedges, withholding the precise moment of violence from the viewer. It isn’t until Ryle’s final assault on Lily—the one that pushes her to finally leave him—that we are given incontrovertible truth of what has happened: flashbacks to prior assaults that, this time, include explicit shots of Ryle putting his hands on Lily. As a result, the viewer moves through the film with Lily’s uncertainty about the weight of what’s happening, and is perhaps as prone to rationalizing Ryle’s actions as Lily herself. Maybe it was just an accident; maybe we are misinterpreting things; maybe there’s a perfectly rational and non-toxic explanation for all of it. Only later does it become vividly clear (for both Lily and the viewer) that there isn’t a way to reason away the abuse.
My most vivid illustration of the difference between how the book and the film handle abuse is a personal one. Reading the book, I had a great deal of sympathy for Lily but felt no personal connection to what she was experiencing. While watching the movie, however, I felt a jolt of recognition: Prior to the start of the physical abuse, Lily and Ryle’s intense early courtship and emotionally fraught arguments bore a striking resemblance to a recent relationship of my own. This wasn’t a complete shock—earlier this year, my therapist had gently suggested that my ex might have been emotionally abusive—but seeing myself in Lily’s onscreen story invited me to engage on a deeper level with what I’d experienced in my own life. For me, the film’s depiction of an abusive relationship rang true and familiar in a way the book’s did not.
Older and Wiser
At the beginning of the novel, Lily is only 23, whereas Ryle is closer to his late twenties. Although the film never explicitly states any of the characters’ ages, movie Lily reads as much older than in the book—perhaps in part because Lively is clearly not a recent college grad. (Star and director Baldoni has also confirmed in interviews that Lily is meant to be older in the film than in the book.) However, this implication is reinforced by other subtle changes to Lily’s character and storyline: In the film, she is already working towards her dream of becoming a florist and has a notebook with years’ worth of sketches and plans, whereas in the book she makes the decision to open her flower shop during a six-month time cut. The overall impression is of a much more mature, adult, and capable Lily than we see in the books.
Friends and Family
In the book, we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know Ryle’s family. In both versions of the story, Ryle’s sister, Allysa, is also Lily’s best friend and first employee at the flower shop; on the page, however, we also get to meet Ryle and Allysa’s parents, who instantly take to Lily and embrace her as a part of their clan. By contrast, they don’t appear in the movie at all. Lily’s family is smaller—it’s just her and her mom—but we similarly see more of Mrs. Bloom in the book than we do on the screen.
The movie also changes how we learn a crucial bit of information about Ryle. In both the film and the novel, Lily eventually discovers that Ryle has spent his entire life haunted by a childhood accident: When he was little, he was playing with his and Allysa’s older brother, Emerson, when the boys found a loaded gun in the garage. Not understanding that it was real, 6-year-old Ryle shot and killed 7-year-old Emerson. It was a tragedy that understandably changed Ryle forever, and it’s heavily implied that this trauma might have contributed to his eventually developing abusive tendencies.
In the book, this information is revealed after Ryle pushes Lily down the stairs. When Allysa learns of their fight—though she doesn’t know about the physically violent aspect of it—she urges Ryle to tell Lily about this tragic family secret. When he does, it directly influences Lily’s decision to forgive him for hurting her. By contrast, the film saves this piece of information until after Lily has already left Ryle for good, leaving Allysa (instead of Ryle) the task of sharing it with Lily.
Atlas’ Restaurant
Lily’s childhood sweetheart Atlas’ successful Boston restaurant plays a pivotal role in both the movie and the book, and the storyline is substantially the same in both versions. However, some small yet crucial details are altered. In the book, Atlas gives Lily a fridge magnet that reads “Everything is better in Boston,” and this inspires the name of his restaurant: Bib’s, short for “Better in Boston.” That’s not the only token of affection he gives her, of course; he also carves a wooden heart for her out of wood from a particular oak tree growing between their houses.
In the movie, the magnet is never mentioned. Instead, the carved wooden heart takes on greater significance, with Lily keeping it in her jewelry box and retrieving it in moments when she especially needs comfort. She has the shape tattooed on her clavicle, too. The oak-tree heart also ties in more directly with Atlas’s restaurant’s name. In the film, it’s called Root, in homage to a lesson he learned from Lily when they were teenagers: that the roots are the most important part of a plant.
Coming Clean
After Lily leaves Ryle, the movie moves swiftly. She stays briefly with Atlas, confides in Allysa about the abuse, and begins rebuilding her life as a single woman. This stands in stark contrast to the book, where Ryle’s final assault takes place just days before he leaves for a planned three-month stint at Cambridge University. Lily stays with Atlas for the better part of a week, even bonding with some of his close friends during that time, before retreating to the now-empty apartment she still shares with Ryle. Once alone in their apartment, Lily retreats into herself, withholding the truth about what happened—and about her pregnancy—from everyone in her life until Allysa pries it out of her.
As part of this period of ambivalence, the novel also shows Lily struggling a great deal with the question of whether to leave Ryle for good or take him back. The movie does away with most of this inner turmoil. While it hints at Lily’s lingering love and affection for Ryle, we don’t see her agonizing over the decision prior to the moment she asks him for a divorce. This is probably more a casualty of format than anything else: the book is written in first-person, so we get access to all her innermost thoughts. However, the film does not include a narrator, and Lily does not have any close friends unconnected to Ryle with whom to hash out this internal debate. Nevertheless, the film’s failure to show the lingering effects of Ryle’s abuse on Lily’s psyche is its one shortcoming in an otherwise fairly elegant depiction of domestic violence and the damage it wreaks.
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.
Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.