A Brilliant, Existential Road Thriller for and by Gen Z
In Alexander Ullom’s “It Ends,” four friends fresh out of college find themselves on a road with no exits. It’s Jean-Paul Sartre with a Gen Z spin, a hangout horror movie rife with existential anxieties that cinema and television have been wrestling with since their inception — from Luis Buñuel to “The Good Place” — and which philosophers have pondered for much longer. That said, don’t let the familiarity of its premise fool you. It’s first and foremost a streamlined, low-budget genre thriller, albeit one whose overtly pulpy flourishes gradually reveal something more tonally surprising, dramatically complex and immensely promising for all the young talent involved.
What’s immediately striking is how quickly and economically its characters are established in medias res, through seemingly banal conversation and hints of individual personality just divergent enough to cause friction. Behind the wheel, the gruff, soft-spoken Tyler (Mitchell Cole), back from military training, picks up his three best friends in his Jeep Cherokee soon after they graduate, as an extremely online debate ensues about whether 50 hawks could best one man with a rifle. Portending later developments, professional upstart James (Phineas Yoon) tries to contort this absurd scenario into a logic puzzle while riding shotgun. In the backseat, the playful Fisher (Noah Toth) tries to ensure the game remains fun, while next to him, the seemingly easygoing Day (Akira Jackson) slips amenably into whatever conversation is presented to her, as she oscillates between this debate and discussions about her future.
With the camera fixed within the car’s confines, the four friends bicker and joke with each other, establishing their collective and individual dynamics, as the premise slowly fades in before we know it. Their hangout quickly becomes a horror movie, briefly awash in soft-focus haze anytime they leave the vehicle, only to find endless forests on either side and, quite terrifyingly, dozens of desperate people in the woods begging for help and trying to steal their car, in scenes where eerie silences give way to hair-raising tension. The group’s solution, of course, is to keep driving no matter how long it takes, or where this endless road takes them.
For reasons inexplicable to the quartet, fuel, hunger and sleep are no obstacle even as days turn to nights, forcing them to consider every possible scenario — sci-fi, religious horror, a shared hallucination — allowing “It Ends” to quickly broach and dismiss all convenient explanations. Through overlapping conversations in tight close-ups, the group’s increasing paranoia and desperation gives way to personal confessions as they attempt to rationalize their circumstances, which simultaneously exacerbates and deepens their bonds. The drama, despite its improvisational unfurling, is rigorous and fine-tuned, making it all the more moving when the film begins to transform in tone, as the group wrestles between depressive dread and genuine attempts to make light of their situation in the face of a future that seems endlessly bleak.
These shifts, while surprising and delightful, are far from random. Rather, they emanate from the richly conceived characters and the way the situation forces them to evolve — and not always for the better. The more they discover about the nature of their predicament and the way it affects their senses (after time periods indeterminate), the more they’re faced with the challenge of abandoning the vehicle altogether — in the process, each other — in favor of a precarious fate by the roadside.
Given the ages of those involved — the filmmaker and his charming ensemble are all in their 20s — it’s hard not to think of “It Ends” as a gateway for younger viewers into new forms of thought and self-reflection. The whole thing could be seen as rooted in the anxieties of close-knit friends being forced to separate after college, but also in its terrifying antonym: never being allowed to grow up and face the world.
The sudden pivot toward isolation and danger, amid the excitement of new adulthood, will likely conjure familiar feelings of the early pandemic, but the film is more than just a linear metaphor. Its lack of answers, as its characters search for both meaning and motivation, uses the very concept of genre cinema — something whose modern incarnation has both strict rules and easily identifiable objectives — to challenge notions of personal and artistic certainty, and tap into the latent sociological fears of burgeoning youth. (Notably, despite their lack of network, the characters’ phones become coping mechanisms in both amusing and wistful ways).
Especially for a generation born into uncertainty — political, economic and environmental — “It Ends” functions as a stark reflection of what it feels like to peek beneath the surface of one’s being, one’s impulses and one’s interpersonal relationships for the very first time. However, the more it exposes those fears, the more they give way to something wildly multifaceted: a film about community under the most absurd forms of pressure, and about how salvation might just lie in other people.
