'It Ends' Review: Somebody Pull Over, Nietzsche's Gonna Retch

The wheels on the car might go round and round but the road stretches straight out to infinity in writer-director Alex Ullom’s It Ends, which tries to be both a reckoning with the wobbly inertia of Late-stage capitalism as well as a treatise on Zoomer malaise, all of it dressed up in the dime-store costuming of one of them there liminal horror flicks that are so popular these days. (It’s Backrooms on wheels! It’s Skinamarink hits the skids!) More an extended and not particularly deep episode of The Twilight Zone than anything that’ll leave you quaking in your khakis, It Ends’ admirable confidence in its own profundity unfortunately runs deeper than any of its observations do. But as a calling card for a first-time director it’s a not-entirely-uninteresting experiment; one where the occasional moment should strike a chord with anyone who sadly finds themselves forced to live through the here and the now. (So presumably anyone reading this review—at least until the A.I. gets hold of it.)

It all starts out simply enough. (And honestly… it stays pretty simple after that.) Four old friends, three of whom have just graduated from college, meet up and hop into a car heading out for one last hurrah before their paths shoot them off in the different directions that life supposedly has in store for them. (If only they’d given more thought to the seminal text that is the song “Life is a Highway”—then they might have seen what was coming. Did none of them take Tom Cochrane 101 in college? Reopen the schools!)

There’s James (Phinehas Yoon), who’s literal-minded and closed-off; there’s Fisher (Noah Toth) and Day (Akira Jackson), who give off big goofy couple energy; and then there’s Tyler (Mitchell Cole), the odd man out (one might even say “the fourth wheel” hardy har) who didn’t go to college and who hasn’t seen any of these friends in quite some time. He’s also, unlike anyone else, got himself a thick Southern accent, which only further confuses the question of how these four know each other—being the person who picks everyone up in his SUV you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s just their Uber driver, so sore a thumb he sticks out as.

Still the four fall into old familiar patterns of conversational nonsense quick enough. Arguing over a dumb meme where you’re asked to choose whether a hundred hawks would beat a handful of gorillas, they’re so distracted that it takes them awhile to realize that they’ve been driving along a stretch of wooded road for a very long time without seeing any visible turn-offs. All while their GPS shows nothing but straight, straight, and yet more straight. Convinced they must’ve missed a turn they pull a 180, but that only leads them to a dead end wall of trees at the spot where Tyler’s convinced they first turned onto this road.

And that’s when the screams start. Hoards of shrieking figures suddenly come barreling out of the trees, tearing some flesh off Fisher’s arm as they all pile on top of the car like some World War Z shite, slapping the terror into everybody. Managing to zoom off only minorly injured, the foursome soon discovers this will happen every time they stop the car—these hoards of the unwashed exploding outta the trees at top speed. Best to keep moving then!

But do hold fast to the scares that happen here at this early point in the film, because you won’t be getting many more—the situation introduces itself as one of something like zombie horror only to in short turn aim for something more existential than old-fashioned night frights. More Samuel Beckett than Sam Raimi, It Ends gives these kids a good creepy reason that forces them to keep driving, and then lets all of that fall away as its story instead sets its brights upon the gut-churning chasm that is post-grad survival. Day reveals she’d attempted suicide; Tyler feels left in the dust by his upwardly mobile former besties. And so on. And on. And on. While the trees turn to green static and the kids start scheduling their daily screams. (That bit definitely resonates!)

If only the movie’s metaphors writ large weren’t quite so undergrad—maybe this critic’s been down this road for so long that the big realizations on display here just seem more naive than they do bolts of lightbulbs bursting above one’s head. For a film aiming at generational profundities, It Ends is far more pedestrian than its Godot-ian road-trip’s airs let on. There’s a more fleshed out contemplation of life slipping through one’s grasp in a goofy-ass movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, which at least had the common sense to keep churning out its B-Movie scares for its entire run—by It Ends’ halfway point you start to feel like you’re trapped in a car with cyphers and thesis statements instead of flesh and blood people, and it only gets worse from there. At least the movie eventually stays true to its title. Somebody pull over, Nietzsche’s gonna retch.