It Ends Review: My Hell Didn't Until The Credits Rolled

There are movies I dislike because they’re poorly made. There are movies I dislike because the acting sucks, the story falls apart, or somebody clearly had no idea what they were doing.

It Ends isn’t one of those movies.

Alexander Ullom’s feature debut is actually really well made. The premise is simple: four friends fresh out of college make a wrong turn and end up trapped on a road that seemingly goes on forever. They can keep driving, or they can stop and deal with whatever the hell is waiting for them outside the car. Ullom takes that incredibly limited setup — essentially four people, a Jeep, and an endless stretch of road — and manages to make an entire movie out of it. That alone deserves some credit.

Unfortunately, those four people are exactly the four people I would least want to be trapped in a car with.

I’m already the wrong audience for a movie built around Gen Z existential dread. I have kids in that age range. I love some of them. Half of them are idiots.

So sitting in a theater for an hour and a half watching four twentysomethings trapped together talking about their lives, their futures, their feelings, and everything else happening inside that car eventually became my own version of the endless road.

If I wanted to be annoyed and have zero clue what the hell four people are talking about, I would have stayed home and talked to my kids.

I'm in Hell either way.

There are things happening outside the car. Strange people. Threats. Questions about where they are, why they’re there, and what exactly this endless road is supposed to be. Almost immediately, I stopped caring about any of it.

I’m still not entirely sure what the hell was happening out there.

And that wasn’t because the movie was confusingly made. I just never connected with what it was trying to say strongly enough to care about finding the answer. I kept waiting for something to click. Some moment where the larger point would suddenly hit me and I’d understand why I had spent all this time riding around with these people.

It never happened.

The movie just… was.

That’s probably the biggest disconnect between It Ends and me. There is clearly something here that speaks to people younger than I am. Ullom has talked about the movie coming from that period after college when suddenly you’re staring at adulthood, an uncertain future, and the realization that nobody is handing you directions anymore. The endless road isn’t exactly trying to hide what it represents. I get it.

I just don’t give a shit.

Maybe that sounds harsher than I mean it, because I absolutely do not want to dismiss what Ullom accomplished. This was his first feature, and he made a confident, distinctive movie with a tiny setup and a very specific point of view. There are filmmakers several movies into their careers who still haven’t figured out how to do that.

In fact, for as much as I hated watching It Ends, I’m genuinely interested in seeing what Alexander Ullom does next. There is talent here. I think this guy has a career ahead of him, and I want to see what he can do with another story, another group of characters, and preferably a location with a few more exits.

That’s the strange thing about reviewing this one. I can recognize that It Ends succeeds at being the movie it wants to be while simultaneously admitting that I fucking hated sitting in that movie. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. My kids probably would have loved it.

But again, half of them are idiots.

Maybe It Ends simply found the one audience member who should never have gotten into that Jeep in the first place. If this is where Gen Z horror is headed, though, somebody can go ahead and take my movie pass now.

I’m not going to need it much in the future.