'It Ends' review: An endless road becomes an existential nightmare

Courtesy of NEON

---

Neither big nor flashy, “It Ends” represents the kind of emerging new voice we could use more of in the cinematic landscape today. Writer-director Alex Ullom’s solid indie horror debut explores a terrifying conundrum involving a version of eternal life that quickly begins to resemble damnation. Four friends are trapped on an endless highway to nowhere, unable to find an exit and increasingly unsure whether there is even a destination waiting for them.

Movies like “Groundhog Day,” “Palm Springs” and “Edge of Tomorrow” have explored the time-loop paradox before, but “It Ends” twists that familiar conceit by asking what would happen if the day never reset. There is no waking up and trying again. Time continues moving forward, and so do you, potentially for eternity.

That nightmare begins when four friends, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and James (Phinehas Yoon), head out on a late-night drive to grab some food after spending the day moving. They make a turn, follow the GPS farther down an unfamiliar road and eventually reach a dead end. When they get out of the Jeep to investigate, a group of young people suddenly descend upon them like maniacs, forcing them back into the vehicle and leaving them with considerably more questions than answers about where they have ended up.

It soon becomes clear this isn’t an isolated incident. Every time the group stops and pulls over to figure out where the hell they are, the same figures emerge from the woods and come running. The deeper they travel, the stranger their predicament becomes. The Jeep’s gas gauge never moves. Nobody gets hungry. Nobody gets tired in the traditional sense. As James eventually points out, they even have “zero sexual desire.” Their bodies continue to exist, but the ordinary biological rhythms that give shape to human life seem to have disappeared.

Made on a shoestring budget of roughly $50,000, “It Ends” works remarkably well because Ullom embraces that scrappy minimalism instead of trying to disguise it. There is a persistent sense of unease baked into the movie, and its simplicity makes it surprisingly easy to put yourself inside that Jeep and start mentally assessing the situation alongside the characters. What would you try? How long could you maintain your sanity? At what point would the possibility of escape become less important than figuring out why this was happening to you in the first place?

Naturally, those practical questions eventually give way to much larger existential ones. The friends wonder whether this is some form of punishment, whether their past mistakes brought them here and whether there is some lesson they are expected to learn before they can leave. Ullom wisely refuses to provide definitive answers, allowing the uncertainty to become more frightening than any explanation probably could. “It Ends” isn’t particularly interested in constructing elaborate mythology around its predicament. Instead, the endless road becomes a canvas onto which these characters project their fears, regrets and increasingly desperate need to believe their suffering must have some purpose.

The chemistry among the small cast is crucial to making that work. Cole, Jackson, Toth and Yoon capture the natural rhythms of longtime friends trying to remain themselves in a situation that gradually strips away everything familiar. They burrow into the Jeep, decorate it, keep track of time and invent games to keep themselves occupied. They even establish carefully timed breaks outside, no longer than 90 seconds before the people in the woods come crawling toward them, where they can simply step out and scream their heads off.

Those details give “It Ends” an unexpectedly lived-in quality. The movie isn’t merely interested in how people might escape an impossible situation, but how they would eventually learn to live inside one. As the days continue accumulating, maintaining routines and finding ways to stimulate themselves becomes an act of psychological survival. Eventually, that forced intimacy brings old wounds and uncomfortable truths to the surface, while the possibility that they may never leave forces each of them to reckon with what acceptance might actually look like. Ullom allows enough time for us to grow attached to these characters that their predicament becomes genuinely upsetting, particularly as hope begins to feel less like salvation and more like another exhausting ritual they are obligated to maintain.

“What if we’re supposed to suffer here?” one character asks during a particularly low moment. Ullom shows considerable restraint by leaving that question unanswered, but it becomes something for the viewer to latch onto as “It Ends” moves beyond its clever premise and toward something much more existential. Is this hell? Purgatory? Random cosmic cruelty? Or is the human need to assign meaning to suffering simply another coping mechanism when confronted with something that cannot be understood?

That ambiguity also gives “It Ends” the potential to find a place alongside the kind of grungy, low-budget horror movies whose limitations ultimately became part of their identity. “The Blair Witch Project” is probably the most apt comparison, not because the movies are particularly similar stylistically, but because both understand the primal terror of watching a group of people become hopelessly lost, increasingly desperate and consumed by the possibility that the answers they’re searching for might never arrive.

Sooner or later, we all reach our destination. With remarkable economy and an impressively unsettling command of its simple premise, “It Ends” asks a far more frightening question: What if we didn’t?

Grade: B

IT ENDS is now playing in theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFszhQLMNXU