‘It Ends’ Review: A Road Trip Takes a Dark Turn in a Well-Crafted if Repetitive Indie Thriller
A road trip among childhood friends turns into a long drive through hell — or a glaring metaphor for the existential dread of post-college life — in director Alexander Ullom’s tense feature debut, It Ends.
Making the most out of one location, one vehicle and four actors, the film milks as much as it can out of a far-fetched scenario that keeps the suspense level relatively high, although it doesn’t amount to much once the gas runs out.
It Ends
The Bottom Line
A literal highway to hell.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Narrative Feature Competition)Cast: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell ColeDirector, screenwriter, editor: Alexander Ullom
1 hour 27 minutes
More conceptual horror than gory nail-biter, It Ends follows in the footsteps of other “It”-titled indie screamers like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night — two movies where an unexplained phenomenon transforms our darkest inner fears into deadly abstract threats. Here, the threat is so outlandish that it’s not easy to wrap your head around it, which is why Ullom deserves credit for delivering such a dubious high concept with plenty of directorial craft.
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The pitch is clear-cut enough: Four 20-something friends — James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and Tyler (Mitchell Cole) — set out for a late-night meal, driving down a dark road through the woods. At some point they miss a turn, then hit a dead end that isn’t even on the GPS. And then, somehow, they’re not riding on a regular road anymore, but on what’s either a two-lane highway to hell or a scenic route through purgatory. Whenever they attempt to stop, a horde of screaming crazies — are they zombies? hungry movie extras? — come racing out of the forest, forcing them to keep driving, well, forever.
It’s a lot to digest for what starts off as a casual joy ride, but Ullom dishes out these bizarre plot points with relative care, making the scenario seem credible enough. Once the stage is set and the four buds realize there’s no easy way to escape their fates (the Final Destination franchise also comes to mind here), they spend the rest of the movie trying to make the best or worst of their infernal predicament.
This is where It Ends winds up stumbling, or rather, hitting some speed bumps. Even if the performances are solid, the characters are never quite compelling enough to warrant spending so much driving time with them. It’s not that they don’t seem like real people — and Ullom has a knack for Generation Z banter — but they never manage to carry the narrative home after the opening twist.
Of the four, Tyler, a local boy who didn’t go to college like his friends and works as an HVAC technician, has perhaps the most interesting trajectory. He’s already experienced what adult life offers and is much more lucid about the hell they’re all facing, as if he already saw it coming. James, who becomes the film’s hero of sorts, is almost the opposite: He’s well-educated and has big dreams for the future, which makes him much more willing to survive the ordeal than the others.
Because Ullom never attempts to explain the source of all this insanity, we’re expected to ride along with his big metaphors — about the long, scary road to the future, etc. — till the bitter end. Eventually his film loses steam when it just keeps going and going without further explanation, even if it sustains enough tension thanks to Ullom’s sharp direction and pacing.
As many filmmakers know, shooting driving scenes can be a hellish experience in and of itself, requiring car mounts, gimbles and all kinds of extra gear. In that sense Ullom acquits himself extremely well, relying on only a cramped station wagon and what looks like the same stretch of road copied hundreds of times over, yet making his movie visually inventive from start to finish.
Cinematographers Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones render the lighting as naturalistic as possible, alternating between murky night scenes and sun-drenched stretches of daylight. It’s a pattern that repeats itself until it becomes another kind of hell — or else a vision of what life is like when you grow up and get a job, then have to keep doing the same routine until your last dying day.
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