A delectably malleable metaphor movie, It Ends follows four friends and recent college grads as they pile into a car to hang out for one last time before heading their separate ways. After driving for quite some time down a wooded, two-lane road, they come to the realization that there are no turnoffs, that the road never ends. Things escalate, but I’ll let you discover how—suffice it to say that what begins as a Waiting for Godot-like puzzler eventually takes on zombie-movie qualities. Like the best zombie flicks, It Ends opens itself up to multiple meanings. The one that works best is the most obvious: the road represents the dull monotony of adulthood, which these grads dread. (James, played by Phinehas Yoon, delivers a dry, deadpan monologue early on in which he lays out every predictable, unremarkable step he expects his life to take.) Yet writer-director Alex Ullom, making his feature debut, slips in details here and there that allow for other interpretations. (James also wonders if they’re dead.) While your mind is whirring, Ullom keeps things visually compelling—an impressive feat considering how he has literally boxed himself in. A montage of jump cuts nicely captures the passage of time, while one shot looking outside the car’s window—simlutaneously capturing the blurring trees along the road and in the side mirror—evokes the disorienting, yet unchanging, passage of time and space that the characters are experiencing. Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole round out the cast, and while all four performances are strong enough to sustain the conceit, Yoon is the clear standout. He steeps James in sarcasm—“I’m not perfect, but this definitely feels like overkill,” James says as they ponder whether they’ve been sentenced to eternal punishment—yet he also manages quiet touches that indicate a deep well of feeling inside, as when he writes his name in marker on a headrest, then smudges it out. It Ends, among other things, chronicles a raging against becoming another smudge.
(8/24/2026)
