It Ends With Us is a book by Colleen Hoover and a movie directed by Justin Baldoni. It is about a young woman named Lilly Bloom who is recently moved to chase her dream of opening up her own flower shop. In the process she meets a man named Ryle and starts a relationship with him but then stumbles upon her high school boyfriend, Atlas, who was her first love when she was younger.
Lilly grew up with her parents having an abusive relationship so she had firsthand experience of the trauma it causes. Lilly’s relationship with Ryle also seemed perfect until he started to show an abusive side to the relationship. Ryle would manipulate Lilly and gaslight her by making a situation seem different than how it was.
The movie helps highlight domestic violence and is a good platform for people to speak up and inform others about. According to Healthline.com, approximately 10 million people go through domestic violence each year and many do not speak up, but this movie may help some people leave the relationship that is hurting them the most. The people who go through this may struggle to speak up because they are scared of what people may think, what the abuser will do to them if they find out, and may lack ways of communication.
It Ends With Us has been receiving a variety of criticism for the movie portraying a love story instead of highlighting domestic violence like in the book.
Yusra Aden, a writer from TheSlate.com stated, “Overall, the movie was not terrible, but it also was not as good as I had anticipated. This movie had the potential to be sensational and educate people, but instead most of the attention has been shifted to the bad marketing and the drama between the cast.”
The film has caused a lot of controversy between Blake Lively and the author Colleen Hoover because they have been receiving backlash on the film for telling viewers to “wear your florals” to the movie as if it was a rom-com. Blake Lively has also received criticism for informing the viewers about her new hair care line called Blake Brown and talking about her husband’s new movie Deadpool & Wolverine while being interviewed about the movie.
Senior Emily Waters shared, “I really enjoyed the movie. It was an eye opener of what some real life situations actually happen in today’s world. It touched me at the end of one of the scenes and made me ball my eyes out.”
I personally think the movie was really good and would have been a good platform to talk about domestic violence, but it ended up having a lot of backlash. Justin Baldoni was mainly the only actor that addressed it in interviews and would talk about how to get help if someone was going through a bad relationship.
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