Warning: The following review contains some spoilers and discusses domestic violence.

With her cascading blonde hair, long legs, and toothpaste-commercial smile, Blake Lively is the epitome of the sun-kissed California beauty. It was actually a little far-fetched that she played some sort of Upper East Side princess in Gossip Girl—she’s surf boards and Laguna Beach all the way. But we bought it, mostly because her primary purpose on that show was to be the foil to the jealous Blair, who wanted the effortless charm that Lively’s Serena possessed.

In It Ends With Us, based on Colleen Hoover’s wildly popular novel (as seen on TikTok!), Lively does not have blond hair, but a mess of cooperative red curls, the sort that exist far more often in romance novels than real life. She wears flowy, artfully mismatched clothing—I spied some Magnolia Pearl, notorious for their expensive schmattas; she also seems to favor these architecturally complicated chainmail boots. She opens a flower shop in Boston, straight out of a “Bohemian Flower Shop” Pinterest board. It’s all a little ridiculous. It seems like cosplay.

Lively’s incongruous casting is a perfect metaphor for the film, which also seems to be suffering from an identity crisis.

At first, It Ends With Us seems like a love story. Lively’s Lily Blossom Bloom—yes, the film makes fun of the name, which feels like cheating since they’re the ones who gave her the name—meets hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) on a rooftop. (For the record, they also make fun of his soap-opera-ready name. Again, YOU NAMED HIM THAT.) She’s up there contemplating her father who just died, but whom she didn’t really love. (More on that in a bit.) Ryle comes on the roof to vent about something—he assaults a chair. Knowing that the film was ultimately going to be about domestic violence, I thought this was a good touch. They’re showing that he has a bad temper. And yet, for a while, Ryle is nothing but a dreamboat. Although he’s a notorious playboy, he vows to change his ways for Lily. He’s doting, sincere, patient. There’s a minor road block once it’s discovered that Ryle is the brother of Lily’s best friend, Allysa (Jenny Slate, here to save us). But their love cannot be stopped! With Allysa’s blessing, Ryle and Lily get married.

Okay, but let’s back-up a bit. In flashbacks, we also see glimpses of Lily’s first love, a homeless boy named Atlas (stop laughing). In those flashbacks, Lily is played by Isabela Ferrer and Atlas is played by Alex Neustaedter, who both only glancingly resemble their older counterparts. The flashbacks here are doing a lot of heavy lifting: They’re showing us Lily’s first love and showing us that Lily’s father beat Lily’s mother and eventually Atlas, when he discovers the boy in bed with his daughter—but they feel perfunctory. Baldoni seems much more interested in the scenes depicting Lily’s adult life (maybe because he’s in them?).

And then Ryle hits Lily. It kind of comes out of nowhere. This film would’ve been notably better if they’d established Ryle’s violent tendencies—getting jealous at a bar, maybe, or being enraged when his much-loved Bruins lose a game. Yes, we saw him assault that chair on the roof, but that was it. Beyond that, he was Prince Charming. Ryle gaslights Lily (and to a certain extent us) into thinking it was an accident. (The film intentional holds back on showing us the extent of his violence until later on.) Lily covers her bruise with some makeup and they go out for dinner with Allysa and her affable husband (Hasan Minhaj). The waiter looks kinda familiar? You guessed it, it’s Atlas, all grown up now and sporting a non-threatening beard (he’s played as an adult by Brandon Sklenar). He’s not just their waiter, he’s the restaurant’s owner and chef. (He is the Swiss Army Knife of convenient plot contrivances.)

Atlas sees the hastily covered bruise on Lily’s face and immediately groks what’s going on, even if she refuses to see it. He and Ryle fight and this is the beginning of the end, as Ryle becomes consumed by jealousy.

I experienced a fair amount of cognitive dissonance watching It Ends With Us—it plays like a sun-dappled romance that suddenly turns violent. (Apparently some people, expecting it to be an uncomplicated love story, felt deceived by the sudden change in tone.)

I appreciate the fact that this is ultimately a film—and book—about ending the cycle of violence. We’ve evolved past the “fall in love with your rapist” trope, thank goodness. But it feels like they want to have their cake and eat it, too, here—a hot romance with beautiful people and a “you go, girl” film about a woman rejecting her violent lover. And then there’s Atlas—chef, waiter, restaurant owner, former homeless kid turned bearded king—waiting in the wings. Is the answer to leaving your abusive husband having a better alternative on deck?

In one of the interviews for Checkmate, I heard Anoop Menon talking about why he decided to do the film eventually. His wife told him that as he is anyway doing a lot of trashy movies these days, why don’t he just do this one too? Well, the end result of that push from his better half has only resulted in the creation of a film that can damage your brain cells. Checkmate is basically an amateur short film that got good funds to enhance its production quality. With a generic story getting tortured by silly screenplay experiments, the movie from Ratish Sekhar is easily the best thing you can recommend to your enemy.

Phillip Kurien, the head of a pharma company that is facing allegations of illegal drug trials, is our central character. His partner Jessy is trying to help him from all the legal troubles by doing her bit. What we ultimately see in the film is the history of these two, the people connected with them, and what they had to go through because of their inhuman actions.

It actually took a while for me to understand the whole story because the film’s screenplay has this nature of going after characters pointlessly for a long time. The narrative shifts from 3 months ago, 12 months ago, the day of the kidnap, 5 minutes before the kidnap, etc., in a very pretentious way to make the audience feel that some sophisticated filmmaking is happening. But the dialogues, be it the Malayalam ones or the English ones, are so theatric that some of them reminded me of that Vipranasam short film. Looking at the way the writing gets lost in unnecessary subplots, you would feel like poking the director to cut the chase and come to the point multiple times during the film.

Anoop Menon appears in multiple looks in the film, and the very first one reminded me of that deleted scene in the climax of Mohanlal’s Mr. Fraud. The guy who sat behind me was saying, “What happened to Khureshi-Ab’raam?” The name of the character might well be Phillip Kurien, but Anoop Menon makes sure that Phillip will act like Anoop Menon. This is perhaps the second misleading thing Lal has been a part of after that rummy ad. Rekha Harindran, who makes her debut through the film, has won the Kerala Film Critics Award for her performance in this movie. Being someone who reviews films, I just want to clarify that I have no association with that organization. There are a lot of debut actors in the film, and I think they all have this hope that the audience would applaud them, like how families root for kids in kindergarten during the annual day performance.

The story, screenplay, music, cinematography, and direction of the film are handled by Ratish Sekhar, and by the end of it, you should feel that he shouldn’t have burdened himself with all those responsibilities. The camera movements are so poor that even the short films made in Kerala with minimal budget have better visual sensibility. Shot division and camera angles are so bizarre. The visuals change from a medium close-up to a low-angle one in split seconds without any motivation, and the editing done by Prejish Prakash with far too many unnecessary cuts would make you think that he was getting paid for the number of cuts. There is a fight sequence towards the end inside a boxing academy, and the conversations that happen after the goons realize they have kidnapped the wrong person is unintentionally comical.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. This is a quote by the great James Cameron. What he forgot to mention was that show it to your friends and family and don’t release it in theaters.

The opening frame of “The Sparrow in the Chimney” evokes a kind of art-directed ideal of country living: In a spacious, rustically textured farmhouse kitchen, mid-afternoon sunlight pours in through open windows so large they double as French doors, looking out onto rolling, summer-kissed lawns and hazy woods beyond. A regal ginger cat slinks in over the sill, as amplified birdsong and insect chatter also seem to blur the indoor-outdoor boundary. A casserole simmers patiently on the stove. Who wouldn’t want to live like this? Pretty much everyone, it turns out, in Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s elegantly vicious domestic horror movie, which forensically unpicks the compacted resentments, betrayals and traumas underpinning a single weekend family gathering, with a touch as icy as the lighting is consistently, relentlessly warm.

The Zürcher twins — who take a joint “a film by” credit on all their work, though only Ramon is billed here as writer, director and editor, with Silvan as producer — have a knack for probing inviting household spaces in a way that renders them unfamiliar, even alien. Their 2013 debut “The Strange Little Cat” observed the everyday routines of an ordinary family from a distance that turned their movements into droll physical comedy, while 2021’s “The Girl and the Spider” located whispers of the uncanny in the back-and-forth of a young woman’s apartment move. The third film in the Zürchers’ “animal trilogy,” “The Sparrow and the Chimney” marries that same detached observational quality and fey sense of the absurd to a more elaborately fleshed-out narrative, crackling with melodramatic danger and intensity of feeling. This increased dramatic heft could earn this Locarno competition entry the broader arthouse exposure that has eluded the Zürchers’ previous work, despite their ardent critical following.

The “animal” aspect of the trilogy isn’t incidental. Throughout “The Sparrow and the Chimney,” the natural world encroaches on human life in ways that don’t feel invasive so much as equalizing, as social conventions and restraints are gradually shed in favor of brute base instincts. The first innocuous sign of this collapse is, well, a sparrow caught in the fireplace of the rambling rural house where Karen (“I’m Your Man” star Maren Eggert) grew up, and is now raising her own gradually dispersing family. The bird is freed, in a dusty flurry of flight, by Karen’s lonely pre-adolescent son Leon (Ilja Bultmann); over the next two hours, few will make quite such a lucky escape.

Karen’s consistently stiff, stricken expression is the first clue that all is not rosy in this apparent idyll. When her younger, cheerier sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) arrives to stay the weekend, with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy) and daughter Edda (Luana Greco) in tow, Karen has to be pulled into a hug, as if her body has forgotten how. When Karen’s eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) joins them from college, too, there’s an anxious void where an embrace should be. Meanwhile, her highschooler daughter Johanna (a scorching Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t touch her mother if her life depended on it: A self-styled Lolita who yearns to escape the nest, she radiates above-it-all hostility toward the world in general, but saves a special white-hot reserve of hatred for Karen. That’s beginning to rub off on cherubic Leon, a precocious gourmet (and vulnerable mark for local bullies) who cooks the family’s meals but doesn’t eat them.

The occasion for this family gathering is the birthday of Karen’s husband Markus (Andreas Döhler), though he’s not much in a mood for revelry either — he’d rather quietly continue his dalliance with the family’s young dog walker Liv (Luise Heyer), who lives in a cottage across the way, and has an alleged history of mental illness and arson. Thus are all the elements lined up for a quasi-Chekhovian knockdown battle of competing desires and miseries, though not every conflict plays out exactly as you might predict: Some aggrieved characters passively watch when you expect them to strike, while others resort to stark acts of violence without obvious provocation. The most aggressive presence here, meanwhile, may be a phantom one: Karen and Jule’s late mother, remembered rather differently by the two sisters, who still wields control over a house to which Karen feels oppressively obligated, while Jule was all too happy to wash her hands of it.

Zürcher’s script balances the excavation of long-buried secrets against a steady stream of present-tense confrontations and revelations, as does his limber, darting editing — while Eggert’s tensely still, hollowed-out performance, as a matriarch increasingly inclined to walk away from familial chaos, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative sturm und drang. The remaining ensemble deftly rolls with the film’s volatile tonal shifts. There’s more broad, barbed comedy in their collective interactions, and occasional, devastating tenderness when they get each other alone — as in one exquisite scene where Christina, despite her recent absence, reads her younger brother’s inner life so acutely as to make him feel, at least for a moment, less alone in it.

“The Sparrow in the Chimney” may be a crowded work, sparking and seizing with nervous energy, but there’s a mutually enhancing tension between the rough-and-tumble of the drama and the refinement of the filmmaking. Characters seem to veritably chafe against the poise and gilded beauty of DP Alex Hasskerl’s immaculate compositions, and they sometimes strain to be heard over the intricate sound design, with its symphonic melding of human rhubarb and the hum, traffic and weather of the outdoors. Nearby, a lake and island where Karen’s children once swam has been taken over by intimidating cormorants, possessively guarding a spot they’re no longer willing to share; perhaps the time has come for this fevered, fractured house to cede itself to the elements.