It Ends is a taut road thriller.
James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth), have just completed college and Tyler (Mitchell Cole) has rotated home to Florida after a tour in the military.
They pile into Tyler’s Jeep Cherokee and follow GPS for something to eat. It takes them down a forest road with no lights, buildings, or other cars. When they try to turn around, the entrance has vanished.
They drive for hours . . . days . . . months, it is impossible to know because the road is displaced from ordinary time and space. They eventually stop feeling hungry or thirsty. The fuel gauge stays at ¼ tank after a million miles.
James, the aspiring engineer, assesses their situation scientifically: are we in hell? Is this an alternate dimension? Fisher suffers panic attacks, Tyler runs into the woods to investigate, and Day keeps everyone sane.
They drive until the movie ends.
Some writers have described It Ends as “existential” but, at the risk of sounding pedantic (way too late, amirite?), It Ends explores the nature of reality — ontology — rather than the nature of existence.
Although James encourages his friends to reveal their moral crimes just as Inèz did in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit (1944), that doomed trio knew they were in hell. Instead of “why am I here?” our four protagonists ask “what is ‘here’?!”
It Ends resembles another independent, horror thriller, The Blair Witch Project (1999). Like Heather, Mike, and Josh in the Maryland woods, Tyler, Day, Fisher, and James must figure out how to survive in altered space-time.
As in Blair Witch, It Ends makes no attempt to answer its key question. In Blair Witch that question was, “what happened to Heather, Mike, and Josh?” In It Ends, that question is “what the f*** is this place?”
Like the quartet in the Cherokee, we must keep going and hope we figure it out.
I suggest a political theme.
Gen Z is inheriting a world that has fully implemented the values of late capitalism — corporate profit at all costs — and watched in horror as the prior generation poisoned the earth, destroyed our democracy, and hung $40 trillion in debt around their necks with nothing to show for it.
We built the road those four, sweet kids have to travel. It is now surrounded by dark woods filled with desperate, ravenous creatures.
It Ends suggests they are terrified about what lies ahead and they have no way to turn back.
It Ends was written and directed Alexander Ullom. It was produced by Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber. It has a running time of 89 minutes.
It was first released on the Letterboxd Video Store and screened at South By Southwest Festival on March 7, 2025. It is distributed in the U.S. by Neon and released in theaters August 21, 2026.
Cover image: Still image, ‘It Ends.’ © Neon.
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