It Ends (2025)
Cast: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth and Mitchell Cole
Director: Alexander Ullom
Nutshell: Four young ex-students with their futures ahead of them take a ride to get some grub, take a wrong turn, and are confronted by an abyss.
Review by Omar Khan

 

The glowing reviews greeting yet another debut feature are encouraging news for horror. Alongside Obsession and Backrooms, It Ends adds to what is becoming an unusually exciting crop of breakout genre films from previously unheralded filmmakers.

That is exactly what horror needs.

Last year we had Weapons, and now a new generation of directors seems intent on pushing the genre into unfamiliar territory with fresh ideas, energy and ambition. The contrast with old-school filmmaking could hardly be greater. While Renny Harlin recently managed to produce three remarkably stale entries in The Strangers trilogy, recycling material that already felt exhausted, these younger filmmakers have been finding new ways to shock, unsettle and provoke discussion.

It Ends may have received considerable critical praise without enjoying the same box-office success as Obsession and Backrooms, but it is every bit as interesting.

There is almost nothing here that traditionally announces itself as horror. No blood. No gore. No knives. No monsters.

And yet the film is deeply unsettling.

Shot on a minuscule budget and carried by a strong cast and an equally impressive script, It Ends creates a steadily intensifying atmosphere of menace that becomes disturbing and, at times, almost unbearably bleak. There are moments when it appears ready to veer towards something resembling Night of the Living Dead, though not in any conventional zombie sense. The similarity lies instead in the feeling of people trapped in an impossible situation while the familiar rules of existence begin to collapse around them.

A simple journey to buy some grub becomes a ride into something the passengers could never have anticipated.

Revealing much more would ruin the experience, because the effectiveness of It Ends depends heavily on uncertainty. The characters — and the audience — are never quite able to understand the nature of what is happening to them. Are they alive? Dead? Trapped somewhere between the two? Is this purgatory, or something even less comprehensible?

The film wisely refuses to provide easy comfort.

Beneath its horror framework lie questions that are far more universal: what happens when hope begins to disappear, when the future becomes impossible to imagine, and when life itself seems reduced to an endless journey without a destination or purpose?

That is where the real terror lies.

The performances are uniformly excellent, while the direction handles fear, frustration, resilience and despair with admirable restraint. The sense of claustrophobia becomes increasingly suffocating, despite much of the film taking place in spaces that should feel open.

Those expecting a traditional scary movie may therefore be surprised. It Ends is frightening, certainly, but not because something is lurking around the corner waiting to leap out.

Its horrors are psychological and existential.

I kept thinking of the Talking Heads line, “We are on a road to nowhere.” It is a wonderfully jaunty song, but there is nothing jaunty about the road these kids have found themselves travelling. Their journey is defined by uncertainty, gloom and the increasingly terrifying possibility that there may be no destination at all.

It Ends is a highly promising debut feature: intelligent, disturbing and impressively confident for such a small production.

The monsters remain unseen.

That may be precisely why they are so effective.