Review: IT ENDS is a Universal Nightmare That Is Ultimately Whatever You Want It to Be

Existential horror might not be new, but doing it well is a challenge that not a lot of filmmakers accomplish. Though It Ends’ director and writer Alex Ullom isn’t the first to do so, there’s an impressiveness to the level of success he has in using the film’s ambiguity to appeal to a broad audience. 

The character archetypes Ullom chooses to play with only broadens that universal appeal. It Ends follows four key players: Tyler (Mitchell Cole), the serious one who got his life together before all of his friends; Day (Akira Jackson), the kind, capable one who takes care of everyone around her first to her own detriment; Fisher (Noah Toth), the comedian who hides behind his jokes and big personality but feels everything the most; and James (Phineas Yoon), the pragmatic one who needs answers. 

Tyler collects the other three from college as the group helps James pack his things to move into his new apartment for his first Big Boy job right out of college. Despite following the GPS, the four find themselves on a seemingly endless road. To make matters worse, they keep getting swarmed by frantic strangers running out of the woods when they get out of the car. Their only option is to drive, and drive, and drive… 

Despite being a tight 90 minutes, It Ends is very much a slow burn kind of story. We’re following along on a journey as each player’s grip on reality is tested while they all grapple with a whole host of existential questions that all boil down to something very simple: do you keep going, or do you quit? 

Because It Ends is a stripped bare kind of story, relying more on a bare bones minimalistic approach rather than coming at your senses from all directions, the film lives and dies by Ullom’s visuals and the small cast’s performances. Each actor fully commits to their respective archetype, while Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones’ cinematography dances with Ullom’s direction to create a film that is very nice to look at. All criticism is subjective, but “this is a well made, good lookin’ film” is the only sentiment that can be offered with any kind of objectivity here. The story itself feels almost impossible to critique by its very nature, as each individual is going to take whatever they need from it at the time.

It Ends’ particular brand of existentialism does, however, benefit from the film’s timing. Ullom graduated college during quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it shows in his storytelling. Every kid feels lost right out of school, but there’s a level of dissociation required when you do so during what feels like the end of the world. Here we sit six years later in our new brand of sociopolitical strife, with hundreds of thousands of people out of work as the systems built to protect the many only support the few. We don’t spend a lot of time reconciling with how these things impact our kids — in fact, historically speaking, we’re more likely to blame them than support them (waves in Millennial).

There’s plenty of opportunity for such blame to be placed in It Ends. It’s easy to judge as characters begin to crack, give up, or betray each other rather than explore the circumstances that led to their actions. We can’t quantify the events happening around them any more than the characters themselves, so our brains immediately turn to rationalization and the introspection of what we would do ourselves in the same scenario. It’s here where It Ends’ biggest truth becomes evident: this isn’t a film meant to satisfy in the way modern audiences have become used to. Instead, we’re challenged to use introspection, empathy, and, yes, a hearty dose of existentialism to try and unpack not just what we’ve watched but how it relates to the world around us. We take what we need from It Ends in the moment, but what each viewer learns from or panics over could change from each watch depending on internal and external factors. That’s existential horror for you, baby!

Some folks are going to react to that exactly as well as Tyler, Day, Fisher and James do but that, too, is also somehow the point here. Nobody has the right answer. We’re all just trying to survive on the road.

Movie Score: 4/5