For many young woman, there have been very few film adaptations as hotly anticipated as Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us. The 2016 book became an internet sensation a few years ago - it took TikTok's #booktok by storm with more than one billion tags and sold 20 million copies weeks as the number one New York Times bestseller. While on the surface the film appears to be a standard romantic comedy, it comes with a dark twist.
Starring Gossip Girl star Blake Lively, it tells the story of Lily Bloom, a young woman who grew up witnessing domestic abuse and winds up in the same position years later. Lily, a florist in Boston, navigates a complicated love triangle between her charming but abusive boyfriend Ryle Kincaid - played by Jane the Virgin's Justin Baldoni - and her compassionate first love, Atlas Corrigan, acted by Brandon Sklenar. Speaking to the BBC at the premiere, Lively says she felt the "responsibility of servicing the people that care so much about the source material".
"I really feel like we delivered a story that's emotional and it's fun, but also funny, painful, scary, tragic and it's inspiring and that's what life is, it's every single colour," says the 36-year-old actress who is married to fellow actor Ryan Reynolds. But the film has been met with some criticism that it romanticises domestic abuse. A two-star review from The Telegraph called it a "queasy drama" that "repackages domestic violence as slick romance".
Tim Robey added that the film "splices abuse and .