Chalk up another success to the University of YouTube. Alexander Ullom shot (and reshot and reshot) It Ends with the intention of debuting it on the world’s biggest video-sharing platform, though in the end a more traditional distributor stepped up for his ingeniously conceived “hangout horror”. Now, Ullom finds himself being talked about in the same breath as YouTube graduates like Curry Barker (Obsession), Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink) and Kane Parsons (Backrooms). Not a bad cohort.
The basic set-up for Ullom’s film is dead simple. A group of old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while pile into a car and set off on the long drive home. As time goes by they realise they must have missed their turning because the one they were expecting hasn’t come up. The road goes on, in a direct straight line through a huge forest. And on into the distance. As more time goes by they start to wonder where that or any other turning can be. What’s going on? The apps say keep going, though there is (curiously) no phone signal. And the road does keep going… and going… and going…
That’s the movie, the neverending road, the road to nowhere, and a car with four people in it who realise pretty quickly that the fuel gauge is not dropping on the vehicle. Nor does anyone need to piss, or sleep, or eat.
It’s yet another re-purposing of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, the infinitely adaptable vision of hell as “other people” (as Sartre put it) – or of being trapped with other people for an eternity. See also 1997’s Cube, 2019’s The Platform (aka El Hoyo), or 2013’s What’s Left of Us (El Desierto). Here, as one day ends, another begins and as the foursome alternate driving, they work their way through the easy topics of conversation, then the difficult ones, eventually starting to systematise their daily grind – doing stretches, dance time, story time, screaming time and also scheduling slots for strategic decision-making, like whether to give up. At one point one of them starts learning Spanish from the car owner’s manual. Groundhog Day existential horror.
As days stretch into months and years (though who knows?), the friends also, in various ways, go through the five stages of grief for their old lives – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – with some of those waystations picking off the less hardy en route to the end credits. What is the meaning of life? How do you confront the concept of eternity? Though there are moments of familiar horror, it’s the stonerish talking points Ullom is most interested in.
Because Ullom is a Gen Z guy, and because his film has largely being designed for the Gen Z cohort, much has been made of Ullom’s mental state a few years ago. The film, it’s said, reflects the depression he found himself in after hitting a rough patch in his late teens. Yes, but… Ullom also went to university in the Covid years, so factor those claustrophobic siege conditions into your deliberations. Both of those things said, there’s no need for psychologising or a back story to bolster this film. Ullom is just very good at working his elegant concept through and at ringing the changes, which let’s face it need ringing if the camera is going to be focused almost entirely on four people in a tight space for 90 minutes.
Props to the actors – Phineas Yoon as James, a doomster of perhaps a theatrical cast of mind (his existential maunderings might all be playacting, in other words); Akira Jackson as Day, the emollient one trying to keep everything together; Noah Toth as Fisher, the handsome dude for whom being handsome is surely enough; and Mitchell Cole as the jock who joined the army when all the others went to college and now feels he has something to prove.
At 30 minutes I wondered how long Ullom and co could keep the ball in the air, but ingeniously they do, making mental friability the film’s faultline rather than external forces. Who’ll crack first? But more than that, how’s Ullom going to extricate himself from the plot nightmare of an endless eternity?
But he does, and with a kind of amused wry shrug. As if to say, “Will this do?” It will.
It Ends – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
