It Ends With Us (2024)

I suppose if it weren’t for the subsequent lawsuits after this film’s release, there wouldn’t have been any better way to advertise the hidden background of this complicated story. Domestic violence is a silent epidemic that gets swept under the living room carpet. In some ways, it’s multigenerational. But unless one is caught up in the relationship itself, the reasons why a woman would tolerate it are unknowable.

To be honest, I didn’t know what we were going to be seeing by watching this film. It got interrupted at the point when Lily meets Atlas in the restaurant he named “Root” which he had named in her honour.

At that point, I shut the Netflix stream off, and never returned to it. It seems I missed the violence.

For my part, I cannot remember a time that a director of a film has lovingly captured the beauty of its female lead. For the first half, at least, Blake Lively is ‘seen’ in a way that is a wonder to behold.

But then things went awry in post-production and nothing was ever the same again.