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Introverts and extroverts view the world in different ways. For most extroverts, a road trip with friends where small talk transforms into the random minutiae of a wandering mind sounds like a blast in eight-hour chunks. To an introvert, the prospect of spending even a fraction of that time “shooting the shit” can be its own special type of torture.
In writer-director Alex Ullom’s debut horror movie, It Ends, both sides of the mind find common ground in a cosmic hell that is as fresh as it is economically clever. It’s the story of four childhood friends who, now as young adults, are preparing to spread off into different directions of life. Three are bound for different colleges, and one is already back from joining the U.S. military. But despite the best laid plans that you might have at the beginning of a journey, the road often proves to have a will of its own. A cruel, malignant will at that, which like a Lovecraftian deity might care little about the innocence or aspirations of a well-lived life.
Such is the predicament that James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) find themselves in. We meet them in medias res, driving down a road after helping one in their group move into a dorm. Despite the movie working as the aforementioned introvert’s worst nightmare, Ullom reveals he has a great ear for characterization and chatty dialogue, using the written word to provide lots of color into a film that tends to largely exist within the confines of Tyler’s cramped Jeep Grand Cherokee, which is frequently driving at night. The film establishes dynamics quickly, too, as pseudo-intellectual and provocateur James attempts to fill lulls in the conversation by asking who would win in a fight: a hunter with a high-powered rifle or a flock of hundreds of eagles?
We learn much by how Day or Fisher humor this flavor of BS, and how Tyler will not as he realizes before anyone else that their GPS is wrong: they’ve been driving for hours down a two-lane road in the woods and never saw the turn-off they expected. James and Day try to razz Tyler as he turns the car around and speeds back, searching for the turn they missed. But no one’s laughing when they realize the road they were driving on all night just… ends, vanishing into thick woods from the direction they came. Before they can even properly debate whether they’re lost, their parked car also begins hearing noises in the woods, whispers that turn into cries as hundreds of souls come begging, pleading, threatening, to be let in the car with foursome.
Our quartet of heroes escape this first brush with being overrun, but for the rest of the film all they have before them is an open, seemingly endless road into the wilderness. And if they ever dream of stopping again for longer than 90 seconds, maybe even to explore the woods around them, they’ll have to contend with the ceaseless horde of the damned or forgotten. It’s unclear where this road will end, but each character has to process in their own manner the discovery of abandoned cars along the way that came from the other direction, each with speedometers exceeding a million miles—or at least two years down the road if you drive nonstop without sleep and taking turns behind the wheel.
There are levels of ingenuity to Ullom’s premise. The first and most obvious is how elegantly it avoids the lack of resources a first-time indie film like It Ends might have. (Before being acquired by NEON, it was a small genre sensation at SXSW.) The movie is almost entirely four characters in a car, along with some deceptively picturesque camera work and drone shots of the wilderness outside, driving forward, always forward. Like Sisyphus condemned to push a boulder up a hill, the kids must bear what is some kind of inexplicable divine judgment or cosmic cruelty by remaining in constant motion. Or at least their car does while they watch the world pass by from their seats.
Also a bit akin to the sinister thought experiments James might never get back to in his philosophy classes, the apparent futility of this exercise demands our heroes to ask the bigger questions about themselves. It’s a credit to Ullom’s script, then, that it allows all four characters to be varying degrees of self-aware. Before the first act in the taught 89 minutes is over, they’re debating if this is Hell and whether they are dead. But if it is, indeed, the House of Perdition, what could any of them have done to deserve this kind of listless existence?
It Ends presents existential challenges, but also banal ones as the characters slowly run out of spiritual, and then trivial, things to discuss. Slowly and surely all that’s left is to simply evaluate what their relationships are… or were as silence becomes more inviting.
This is my first encounter with any of the four actors who collectively do solid work, though Yoon gets the lion’s share of anguish to explore since James remains the only one of the group who will not let go of the dream that the road ends, and that there is a reason they’re here. In their own ways, the other friends stay engaged by savoring the smaller things, like a sharpie discovered in an abandoned vehicle that lets them redecorate the Jeep’s interior, or the chance to scream into the void during one of their 60-second breaks outside the car every morning. Yoon, however, gets to play a character who breaks the hardest because he holds on the longest.
It does not take much squinting to recognize the larger metaphor at work—the optimism and naiveté of young minds who thought their journey would go one way, and who never reached that goalpost. Instead they find themselves on a path they cannot reconcile or explain. To search for meaning in that can be as fruitless as the aforementioned Sisyphus and his boulder. Demanding answers from existence has always required a bit of self-flagellation.
It Ends is a shrewdly crafted first-time film in the horror genre that reveals enough arresting sense of style and tone to fill 90 minutes in a Jeep with all the terrors, joys, and minor indignities of living. It’s enough to get the introverts to lean in, and the extroverts shudder with dread while searching for the exits. It does indeed end, but the parable lingers with you after the credits.
It Ends opens on Aug. 21 in the U.S.
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