Plot: Four friends post college plans are derailed when a wrong turn traps them on a never ending backroad.
Review: This is turning out to be a hell of a year for new horror filmmakers. With Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parson’s Backrooms breaking records at the box office, it seems like every marketing campaign wants to tout connections to anyone related to those hit films. Neon’s latest release, It Ends, a festival pickup from last year’s South by Southwest Festival, has already been glimpsed by a decent number of people thanks to a limited release on social platform Letterboxd back in December. But, with audiences clamoring for the next generation of horror on the big screen, It Ends will get a wide theatrical release this weekend. Without gore or any true jumpscares, It Ends manages to evoke a sense of impending doom and pervasive dread as it follows a group of friends stuck in an endless loop that forces them to question their own sanity. It is a strong debut from writer/director Alexander Ullom and a movie that will certainly please fans of the style of horror on the big screen this summer.
Using a simple concept straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, It Ends opens with recent college graduates James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) as they get picked up by their friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole). The four head out on a trip to an unknown destination and chat and spend time together as they would on a typical afternoon. As they debate silly topics about which animal would win in a fight, they drive further and further down an isolated road through a forest. As time goes by, they realize there are no exits or places to leave the road, so they turn around and find the way they came blocked by a barrier of trees. Before they can take more than a few steps away from the car, a mob of people run out of the forest and swarm them, clawing and begging to get into the vehicle. Barely escaping, the four friends keep going and find themselves never running out of fuel and never able to go in any direction but straight ahead. And that is only the first fifteen minutes.
Trapping characters in an inescapable setting has been used before in everything from the sci-fi movie Cube to Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Some have compared It Ends to the famous Jean-Paul Sartre play No Exit, which finds three people in the afterlife stuck in a room for eternity, but it does so with a Gen Z update. While they have cell phones, the characters have no signal. They have limited food, but no hunger to satiate. As the miles increase and the days extend into infinity, we see the relationships fracture even as the friends try to escape the hell they find themselves in. Listening to the same music or getting on each other’s nerves with inane conversation topics could have become repetitive and boring when shown ad nauseam, but It Ends keeps things moving with the occasional excursions outside of the car to see if they have any routes they can traverse on foot. The people who come running at them and the paranoid sense that may or may not be in the woods keep the tension at maximum.
Using four unknown actors, It Ends allows the audience to experience what these characters are going through, and question the same things at the same time. Should they eat or turn off the car? Are they dead and being punished? How did they end up here? The answer to these questions is less important than the journey the characters are on, and It Ends allows the friends the space to argue and discuss their plight, which also begins to normalize this clearly supernatural situation. Because It Ends is not focused on monsters, zombies, or overt evil, the story unfolds like a drama or a play, with the setting remaining static even though the car never stops driving. The chemistry between the actors feels like they are old friends, and we are watching how they would communicate on a normal road trip rather than on this extreme journey. Each one of them brings a different personality to the shared experience, ranging from Tyler’s non-collegiate life to James asking the most existential and challenging questions to the group. As truths are revealed and dynamics between the characters change, the actors do a great job of adapting to the shifts in stress they face.
Writer/director Alexander Ullom has made an impressive debut feature that serves as an allegory for the challenges of becoming an adult and the seemingly endless road ahead of you once you finish school. It also works as an examination of the generational divide between how many of us grew up in decades past and the worldwide isolation that younger people feel with the online world siloing us more and more from each other. It Ends also works as a straight thriller with horror themes as well as a solid indie drama about four people stuck in a car together. The impressive way the movie works across any number of interpretations proves how well-crafted a movie this is. Yes, it is scary, but more than just in a conventional manner. Add in a subtle but appropriate score from Matthew Robert Cooper and the tight, disquieting cinematography of Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones, and It Ends is designed to make you uncomfortably glued to where this road trip may lead.
Despite the title, It Ends eventually reaches a conclusion, and it is a satisfying way to wrap a story that could have gone any number of directions. It Ends is exactly the type of movie, like Obsession and Backrooms, that uses the themes and tropes of horror beyond just slashers and demons. It Ends is scary while also working as a straightforward drama with a twist that harnesses a single-location setting better than many films made by veteran filmmakers. It may not have the same online clout or built-in fan recognition that helped Obsession and Backrooms become box office juggernauts, but It Ends has the potential to be a word-of-mouth hit and a reason to keep an eye on what comes next from Alexander Ullom.
It Ends opens in theaters on August 21.