It Ends Review

Finding Meaning on an Endless Road

By: Marc Kozak

It Ends

Finding Meaning on an Endless Road

By: Marc Kozak

As 2026 begins to wind down and we start to celebrate a year filled with breakout horror films from young YouTubers — most notably Backrooms and Obsession — let’s be sure to add Alexander Ullom’s It Ends to the list. Ullom started working on what would become his debut feature when he was 22 years old and has spent the last six years gradually refining and even reshooting large chunks of the project. After its successful debut at 2025’s SXSW, the movie was selected as one of the first movies to launch Letterboxd’s VOD service, before eventually getting picked up by Neon for theatrical release this August.

All of that time spent in the development stages has clearly paid off, as the final product is not only a confidently made feature from a talented young cast and crew, but a thought-provoking and often genuinely unnerving slice of existential dread. Its Twilight Zone-esque premise — what if a group of friends turned onto a deserted road while driving through the woods and the road just never ended — allows for all sorts of interpretations, including a few that are likely to resonate with younger generations who might be feeling disillusioned about an increasingly uncertain future. It’s a clever piece of low-budget genre fare that might not have the same flash and pizzazz as some of its contemporaries but still serves as an interesting perspective from another exciting new voice in the horror sphere.

After very little preamble, we are along for the ride in a Jeep Cherokee with four friends in various stages of post-college adulthood. James (Phinehas Yoon) is a cynical know-it-all about to start what he believes is a long career in boring office jobs. He is unable to resist needling the taciturn Tyler (Mitchell Cole), a young military vet with a Southern drawl. Fisher (Noah Toth) tries to keep things light with some inane banter about whether 50 hawks could beat one man with a rifle, while Day (Akira Jackson) slips easily into any conversation, no matter how silly or serious.

" In a world where we continue to barrel forward into the terrifying unknown, maybe the best we can hope for is the simple pleasures of hanging out in the car with our friends. "

Ullom uses this brief opening act to capably give us a pretty good idea of what each character is all about before things start to go sideways. They are following the directions of a GPS (to somewhere that I don’t think is ever said), but it becomes clear pretty quickly that something is off. For one thing, it doesn’t seem like there are any turns off of the road they are on, which just keeps going for miles with nothing but dense forest on either side. They eventually head back in the direction they came from, but even the turn that brought them onto the road doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Tensions are already high when suddenly the road just stops with nothing but trees in front of them.

As Tyler gets out of the car to check out their surroundings, a horde of screaming people emerge from the woods and rush at the car with frenzied desperation, even badly injuring Fisher’s arm as they attempt to eject him from the vehicle. The four friends manage to escape and keep driving back down the road, hoping that their turn will appear. After a few experiments, they discover they have about 90 seconds to stop the car before people continue to come out of the woods. They don’t really have much of a choice; they simply have to keep driving.

The initial thrill of this premise carries the viewer only so far before questions start to set in. Ullom (who also wrote the screenplay) anticipates this and does what he can to quickly dismiss those questions and keep the focus on the allegory at hand. For some, this might be an impossible hurdle to overcome. The car is able to drive for thousands and thousands of miles but never runs out of gas. Our four friends never get tired, hungry, sick, or horny. Those kinds of pesky details are all secondary to putting the characters in a situation where they have to emotionally and intellectually deal with the fact that they are stuck on an eternal road. Eventually, even the threat of attackers from the woods goes away, and the tone fully shifts away from horror into more of a literary exercise. As such, the second half suffers a bit as the viewer’s pulse is allowed to downshift into a more restful state. It’s a bold move, and credit to Ullom that he is mostly able to keep the audience engaged despite the distinct lack of actual events.

That being said, your mileage will likely vary depending on how willing you are to engage with the movie’s thematic material. It also helps if you’re able to see yourself in one (or any) of the characters or at least discern the kinds of people they are meant to represent. Watching Fisher have a few panic attacks while whining about how he wants to go home is certainly relatable, but not exactly helpful (or even fun to watch). The little daily routines that the group creates to keep themselves sane — such as taking a scheduled break every day to just go out of the car and scream as loud as they can — are also mildly amusing, effectively communicating the atmosphere of monotony that our characters are living in, despite coming perilously close to creating the same atmosphere for the viewers of the movie.

Perhaps the key to unlocking the movie is understanding what’s going on with James, who becomes obsessed with figuring out what is going on. Long after his friends have either given up or resigned themselves to their fate, James continues to soldier on, looking for meaning in anything and everything, refusing to believe that he is no longer in charge of his own destiny. Every drop of rain or sudden appearance of an abandoned car on the side of the road becomes a message to be decoded; “this is different,” he muses, even as he gets no closer to any answers. Indeed, this isn’t a movie interested in providing answers — it’s more about searching for meaning in the questions. In a world where we continue to barrel forward into the terrifying unknown, maybe the best we can hope for is the simple pleasures of hanging out in the car with our friends.

Turning the idea of “journey over destination” into a movie isn’t anything new, but It Ends is a clever twist on the concept, executed admirably by four young actors with not a lot of credits to their names. And really, no matter how trite or heavy-handed it might seem on its surface, Ullom’s cautiously optimistic conclusion seems like a revelation in a world (and generation) that seems to be perennially stuck in doom and gloom. Sure, the road ahead has never seemed bumpier and it doesn’t look like it will be improving any time soon, but there is still value in the act of persistence.