Every so often a film comes around that stops me dead in my tracks. It is not necessarily the best film of the year, or the one with the biggest budget, or the most esoteric one. Rather, these are films with such original concepts and immersive world building that they cannot be ignored. For both 2025 and 2026, that film is It Ends.
It Ends started playing film festivals over 18 months ago, and had a production journey of nearly five years. Though this may be writer/director Alex Ullom’s first credited work as a director, but it is anything but an overnight sensation. It Ends first started as a student film project, and in a recent Instagram post, Ullom references starting the film at age 22 with $35k (to begin). To go from that, and what sounds like a slew of reshoots, to end up with a wide release from in the U.S. from NEON, is nothing short of cinematic miracle. But miracles can be random and Ullom’s film is no unintentional success. It is thoughtful, insightful, and downright terrifying.
Like many films that fit into the strange classification of speculative fiction, It Ends is based on a question. Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day infamously asks, “What if time broke?” George A. Romero wondered repeatedly, “What if death broke?” And Cube poses, “What if physics broke?” For It Ends, the film asks a big, compound question: What if a journey broke?
The film starts innocuously enough. Four childhood friends come together to help one of them move from college to their first real adult apartment. James (Phinehas Yoon) is about to start a post-grad job, so buds Fisher and Day (Noah Toth and Akira Jackson) pile into Tyler’s (Mitchell Cole) Jeep to set out and start the next phase of their lives.
While it is clear some time has passed since the four friends have been all together, it is also evident that the time means little when the roots of friendship grow so deeply. They play stupid road games to pass the time, and trust Tyler to follow the directions on his phone. That is, until they have reason to question him.
A tense interaction with the stubbornly assured Tyler leads to butting heads in the group to argue about whether a not a turn was missed. Tyler is headstrong and defensive, while James is confrontational and unsympathetic. However it will soon be evident that such a small detail makes no difference on this trip.
Trailers for It Ends show very little of the mechanics of this trip and the terrors that wait ahead. Suffice to say that things get very very bad very soon for our quartet, and that is only the beginning of their horrors.
It Ends carves out a space for itself to defy rules while still acknowledging them. What happens along this road, in this car, makes very little sense to the group because it blatantly ignores every constant known to physics or religion alike. The film explores what happens to people when reality refuses to function, but their minds are still sharp and clear. The physical horrors to them are quite real and immediate, but the existential terror is what they should fear even more.
All four leads are played with exceptional care and immersion into their world. Given the extreme nature of their circumstances, personalities amplify and differences in coping strategies are put on naked display. The acting could not be more apt, and each young actor deserves praise for what they create throughout their character arcs.
Shooting a feature film in a swiftly moving car must have been no small feat, but It Ends keeps the visual structure of this trip interesting and varied. Though the car does at times feel like a cell or a casket, the surrounding woods and road itself truly contain these travellers, and the omnipresent wall of trees, floor of asphalt, and ceiling of canopy keeps that in focus literally and metaphorically throughout the emotional ebbs and flows.
The sheer inventiveness and high-concept of It Ends naturally lends itself to layers of interpretation and digestion. Some of the best films to chew on lay out extraordinary circumstances and give the audience space to bring their own personal preoccupations into the cinema, to blast up onto the screen and see themselves.
It Ends does initially feel like a reaction to that moment of being on the narrow cusp of adulthood. School and childhood are over, and it is impossible to mentally prepare for the gargantuan mass of adulthood staring back at you. Sure, there are birthdays and vacations here and there. But you will soon get to an age when you forget exactly how old you are, or when you last saw your childhood friends. No more summers off, or final days of school to commemorate the passing of time. Time keeps passing with less and less fanfare. This absorption into doldrums may never come or it may come without warning, much like the ease into the horrors in It Ends. It is impossible to say when it began, but now that we are here, what does that matter?
It may sound dramatic to refer to It Ends as brilliant, but that is the reality. The film both shouts and whispers its horrors at the audience. It’s uneasy and oddly comforting at the same time, much like life itself.
