At The Movies: Facile melodrama in It Ends With Us, Dead Talents Society a lively screwball horror
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively in It Ends With Us.
PHOTO: SONY PICTURES
Follow topic:
It Ends With Us (NC16)
130 minutes, opens on Sept 5
★★☆☆☆
The story: Blake Lively produces and stars as a florist named Lily Bloom, who falls for sexy neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni). The 6.9 million readers of American author Colleen Hoover’s 2016 best-selling source novel should warn her the dream lover has a temper.
Ticket-buyers heading to the theatre are urged to “grab your friends” and “wear your florals”, and if that were not tone-deaf enough, Lively availed herself of the movie’s publicity to cross-promote her Blake Brown hair-care line.
It Ends With Us is about domestic violence. Even leaving aside the misjudged marketing, this Hollywood gloss on Hoover’s BookTok phenomenon is facile in its treatment of the heavy issue.
It begins like a chick flick, with Jenny Slate as the kooky store assistant bestie.
She is the sister of Ryle, played by director Baldoni (Jane The Virgin, 2014 to 2019). The co-leads smoulder convincingly as the besotted couple. Then comes Ryle’s thwack, leaving Lily with the first of many black eyes and broken ribs.
Beauty and wealth are no protection against toxic relationships: Lily’s upstanding town mayor dad (Kevin McKidd) is seen battering her mother (Amy Morton) in flashbacks.
The co-dependency is for most victims a self-destructive generational trap. Breaking the cycle of abuse is the story’s hopeful albeit disingenuous message, when Lily can get her bags packed within just half a dozen scenes.
Easy for her, since she has real-life gal pal Taylor Swift’s soundtrack ballad My Tears Ricochet to commiserate with.
Most conveniently, she has her high-school true love Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), now a celebrity chef, suddenly reappearing to rescue her and turn her trauma into a female fantasy romance.
Hot take: A US box-office hit, this melodrama on spousal assault forgoes psychological and character complexities for congenial viewing.
Dead Talents Society (NC16)
110 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆
(From left) Chen Bo-lin, Sandrine Pinna and Gingle Wang in Dead Talents Society.
PHOTO: SONY PICTURES
The story: What eternal rest? Being a ghost is hard work. In the afterlife of this Taiwanese comedy, the dead will fade away into nothingness unless they hone their fright tactics and audition successfully at an annual talent show for a professional haunting licence.
Taiwanese film-maker John Hsu won the Golden Horse Awards’ best director and best screenplay prizes for the video game adaptation Detention (2019).
Dead Talents Society returns his breakout star Gingle Wang for an equally acclaimed sophomore feature of more light-hearted supernatural thrills: an antic journey of a Rookie ghost who is as unremarkable in death as in life, having recently perished alone in her room during an earth tremor.
At her entry contest, the mousy teen is jeered off-stage for her best effort – which is to say “boo” with arms limply raised.
Underpinning this zesty send-up of horror genre cliches is the very real existential fear of oblivion, because haunting humans is how the deceased remain in the liminal mortal realm to stay connected to their loved ones.
Ghosts, too, mourn and Rookie misses her parents dearly.
Every entity has a backstory. Icy phantom diva Catherine (Sandrine Pinna) is an urban legend, the resident curse of a dilapidated hotel: her signature move is The Exorcist (1973) spider walk.
Her agent played by Chen Bo-lin is a late 1980s pop idol, and Rookie’s sidekick (Bai Bai) plus a jaded technician (Soso Tseng) are the others in the crew of funny likeable misfits.
It is a riot as they take Rookie under their tutelage to help her dial up her scares before her 30-day probation expires.
Hot take: There is humour and thoughtful reflection in the imaginative (nether)world-building of this ebullient screwball horror.