What’s It About

Friends on a late-night food run become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Four friends climb into a Jeep Cherokee for one last drive together before life sends them in different directions. That is how It Ends begins, and it is also how the movie traps you right along with them. Written and directed by Alexander Ullom in his first feature film, It Ends turns a simple night drive into a long, slow study of what happens when time stops moving forward.  Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) grew up together, and this drive is supposed to be a small goodbye before their paths split for good. They pass the time asking each other silly hypothetical questions, teasing one another the way old friends do. Then Tyler misses a turn. When he steps out of the car to check the road, a swarm of screaming strangers rushes out of the trees. The group gets away, barely, but the turn they needed is gone, and the road just keeps stretching out ahead of them. The car never runs low on gas. Nobody gets hungry or tired. And every time someone steps outside for longer than ninety seconds, the mob comes running again.  A setup like that could have gone in a hundred cheap directions, but Ullom skips the easy scares. There is no single monster hunting this group, and there is barely any blood on screen. The R rating comes only from language. Instead, the fear grows out of the situation itself: four people stuck together with no answers, no way out, and no idea how long any of this will last. That kind of stuff sticks with you longer than a jump scare ever could.  What really holds the movie together is how much weight it gives its four leads. This is not the kind of horror movie where characters exist just to be picked off one at a time. Each person in that car gets a real inner life, and the four young actors carry that job well. Yoon plays James as someone who needs the world to make sense, a guy convinced that if he thinks hard enough, he can crack the code of this impossible road. Watching that belief slowly work against him is some of the strongest acting in the film. Jackson gives Day a quiet heaviness that comes into focus bit by bit, hinting at a hard chapter of her life that the road now forces back to the surface. Toth brings a sense of humor to Fisher, adding a touch of lightness in the worst moments for the group, while Cole portrays Tyler as a frustrated person who took a different road than his peers but still thinks he didn’t choose wisely. Luckily, none of the characters are reduced to stereotypes as they have arguments, jokes, and breakdowns, and what’s more important, the director trusts his actors enough to let everything play out in full detail.   As days passed and blended into one another in the car, It Ends becomes not just a typical chase film but a thoughtful character study. The friends find little things to do, starting from screaming and chatting and finishing with sitting together in peace. When things start to change, like those strange people running at them, the group grabs onto it as a possible sign that escape is close. This new style of bare minimum horror has been showing up a lot lately, in movies like Backrooms and games like Exit 8, where the real threat is not a creature but a space that refuses to end. It Ends is like that, but but different because it cares more about the people trapped inside the loop than the loop itself. This movie raises some genuine questions and never seems to hurry to answer them. So, what do you owe your fellow company when things are going nowhere? Is it better to keep looking for a way out of it, or is it better to get used to living in this situation? By depriving his characters and the audience of food, sleep, and any grasp on time, Ullom makes them face these questions without any escape.  Visually, cinematographers Jazleana Jones and Evan Draper make smart use of a tight, limited space. Sunlight makes the woods outside the car look inviting, almost like a normal afternoon drive, which makes it even more unsettling once you remember that stepping too far from that Jeep could get somebody killed. Over time, the inside of the car starts to look lived-in too, covered in inside jokes and scattered belongings, turning the vehicle into something between a shelter and a prison. Small choices like these do a lot of work in keeping a story that takes place almost entirely inside one Jeep from ever feeling flat or still.  Of course, It Ends has its rough patches. When the shock of the first act wears off, the story becomes tedious as it stretches itself thin, and the middle section starts to feel like an overlong episode of a show that already made its point twenty minutes earlier. The wandering hordes attacking the friends never feel like a real threat past the first couple of scares, which drains tension from later scenes that need it most. Ullom also leans on a habit of switching aspect ratios throughout the film, and rather than adding meaning, it mostly just calls attention to itself and pulls you out of the moment. A little more menace from the world outside the car would have gone a long way toward keeping the pressure on through the back half.  Despite its issues, It’s sure to have a huge following, making it one of this year’s most interesting debuts in the horror genre. It doesn’t use cheap tricks to scare the audience but instead creates a sense of tension throughout the film and delivers on that through the actors’ performances, who do not allow the concept to overshadow their characters. It’s not as good as either Obsession or Backrooms, but it will surely stay in your mind long after the credits roll, since that’s what a film based on unanswered questions should do.

OUR RATING – AN UNANSWERED 5.5