It Ends
Writer/Director: Alexander Ullom
Cast: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole
It Ends is all about the journey. Literally.
Clocking in at a lean 90 minutes, it is a film without flashbacks, without connections to the outside world, without swerves that take you away from the core of its conceptual brilliance. It begins with four friends getting in a car, and it never looks back. The results are riveting, and Alexander Ullom's directorial debut deserves to rank among the best first horror films in recent memory thanks to a remarkable clarity of vision, and remarkable commitment to the nightmarish, endless hum of the wheels beneath its engine.
James (Phineas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) are excited to reunite with their old friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole). It's been a long time since they've hung out just the four of them, and while James, Day, and Fisher have been off studying, Tyler's been…well, changing, becoming the kind of adult that his friends have just a little more trouble recognizing. That's okay, though, because the quartet of friends are about to get some quality chill time in the form of a long drive where they can talk about their lives, debate random bullshit, listen to music, and slip back into their old dynamic.
What starts as a placid drive along a forested, quiet highway soon turns into something else, though, when the friends realize the turn they were looking for never came. When they try to turn around, they meet only a wall of trees, as if the road rolled up behind them and disappeared. Confused and terrified, they keep driving, only to eventually learn that the road seems endless, there are no turns, and getting out of the car means being mobbed by stranded motorists driven mad by isolation and, perhaps, the horror of being frozen in time, unable to escape or die.
It would be very easy, even with a tight runtime, for a film like this to get conceptually restless, to introduce monsters or wormholes or play with some other subgenre fun to really drive home the horror elements, but It Ends resists all temptations to stray from its very definite path. This is not one of those "Oh you just think you know where it's going" horror movies. Like the road itself, it moves in a straight line, exploring the existential dread that sinks in as the characters come to grips with their new reality, and the ways in which they try to think around it. What happens if they turn off the car? How long can they realistically keep this up? What does it mean to leave the car and step into the woods? These are the questions with which the story is preoccupied, and Ullom's script, helped along by an excellent young cast, drills down deep to answer them all.
This kind of conceptual tightness is admirable, but It Ends reaches further toward greatness by somehow, even in its straightforward narrative, crafting a story that can mean many things to many people, just as it means something different to all four of the people in the car. Is the film a metaphor for the endless drive of careerism pushing in on four young people just trying to live their lives? Is it a story of dissolving friendships as each of the foursome tries to determine their own eventual fate? Is it just a depiction of Purgatory, and we're following four dead kids slowly coming to grips with their end? These are, believe it or not, all valid interpretations, and they all pack an emotional punch. It's not that the film fails to commit to an emotional arc; it's that its multivalence is built right into the concept and the characters, and it's brave enough to wield that with sincerity and grace.
A lot of that grace, of course, comes from the actors, all of whom are incredible in this film. Single-location movies — and despite a constantly moving car, this is very much a single-location movie — are always tougher to pull off than they look, and that's true for the actors as well. Confined to an SUV moving down a road that never changes its geography or even its weather, this quartet of performers extracts maximum meaning from even the most infinitesimal shifts in emotion and perception. They grow and change, if not physically then emotionally, and they are not the same people even halfway through this film as they were when it started. This is a movie about the enormity of something just beyond what appears to be a very small space, and that is very, very difficult to depict through a glance, or a gesture, or a nod. Yet Yoon, Jackson, Toth, and Cole (the real MVP of this one for me, and the most understated) manage to pull it off. It's a marvel of an acting showcase for all four of them, and I can't wait to see what each of these actors does next.
It Ends is an essential piece of 2026 horror, not just because it's a great film hitting wide release this year, but because it says something about where we are in this moment. Amid its many interpretations, it is also, crucially, a story about a ride that seems to never change, an endless grind of gears and wheels and motors on which we can make only a small mark. It speaks to the helplessness we can all feel in 2026, and trapped though they are, watching these four young people in a car for a bit made me feel a little less lost.
It Ends expands to theaters nationwide on August 28.
