It feels like many horror films in recent years begin and end in the pitch meeting. A kooky premise is introduced, funding is secured, and the brainstorming ends there. This is why so many, in execution, may begin intriguingly, but lose steam and peter out. This is also why It Ends is so refreshing. It takes its easy-to-market conceit and plays with it, iterates on it, takes it to logical conclusions, and keeps things interesting until the very last moment. Indeed, it’s difficult not to want to give the film too much kudos for simply bucking the industry trend of unfulfilled promise. The best horror, now as ever, requires follow-through.
First-time writer/director Alexander Ullom has another trick up his sleeve beyond subversion: an authentic rendering of Generation Z. Most cinematic depictions of this broad category tend to simplify, caricaturize, or otherwise simply get them wrong. It surely helps that Ullom is of the generation himself, but that’s never a guarantee of insight or perspective, either. These characters — four twentysomethings who are feeling aimless after college, and end up on a literal endless road to nowhere — feel immediately familiar, and are written well enough to also feel startlingly real — particularly for the genre. The performers offer no small assist to the writing, bringing the characters further to life and quickly establishing the group’s inner dynamics and tensions. They speak and act like people, are believable under extremely bizarre circumstances (if they stop the car, they are attacked; keep the engine running), and each one makes choices along the way that are at least parsable by logical standards, even if you wouldn’t necessarily do the same.
This, too, is part of the film’s unique appeal. Its story and its central metaphor are both exceedingly simple, but are crafted thoughtfully and injected with genuine pathos. The audience can’t help but be drawn in, particularly with regard to the central provocation: how would you react? The further these young adults drive, the more acute that troubling metaphor becomes. Why do we keep going? What’s it all for? What does any of it mean? Gen Z is not the first generation, of course, to deal with an overwhelming ennui, an existential dread that permeates everything, including our closest relationships. Ullom succeeds, then, in providing various specificities in character and perspective to help reckon with such eternal dilemmas. Without putting too fine a point on things, perhaps It Ends is, quite sincerely, about the friends we made along the way.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 3.
Comments are closed.