It Ends opens with a premise horror has used before — a group of friends, a wrong turn, a forest that won't let go — but first-time director Alex Ullom is doing something structurally different. This isn't a monster movie or a slasher. The threat is duration itself: an endless road, a gas gauge that never moves, bodies that never hunger or tire. The film's $50,000 budget forces exactly the kind of formal compression that makes this work — almost the entire film takes place inside a hatchback, and that constraint becomes the point. The setup is spare. After helping a friend move, four twentysomethings take a late-night food run and follow GPS into a desolate forest. When they stop, they're surrounded by people who look disturbingly like them — young, casually dressed, terrified. The film doesn't explain this double. It doesn't explain much at all, and that restraint is the right call. Ullom is chasing dread, not mythology. What keeps It Ends from collapsing into a one-note mood piece is its cast. The foursome — Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and James (Phinehas Yoon) — have warm, naturalistic chemistry. They play road trip games, celebrate birthdays, cover the car interior in dry-erase marker drawings until it looks like a psych ward cell and a graffiti tag had a child. The film's funniest and most tender scenes live inside this box. Fisher finds something like peace; James rages at the sky. That friction matters. Ullom has said the film comes from his own experience with dissociative depression and the search for a framework that makes life survivable. That's not a framing device — it's the mechanism. The endless road isn't metaphor layered on top of horror; it IS the horror, which is why the film lands closer to the Prometheus myth (eternal suffering, no exit) than to the breezy time-loop mechanics of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs. The question the film keeps circling — what's the difference between this nightmare and ordinary life hurtling toward an uncertain future — is one it earns the right to ask. There are stumbles. A joke about a character wishing she'd downloaded Subway Surfers already reads as dated, which is a small but real problem for a film trying to speak to a timeless malaise. And while the ambiguity is mostly a strength, viewers who need resolution will leave frustrated. The film explicitly declines to answer its own central question. That's a feature if you're on the film's wavelength; it's a wall if you aren't. The score deserves a sentence: creaky, textural, perfectly calibrated to a film that has no money for practical effects and doesn't need them. The dread is atmospheric, not mechanical. For a debut feature at this budget, that's a genuine craft achievement. It Ends releases in the US on 21 August and 3 September in Australia, with a UK release to follow. At this price point and ambition level, it belongs in the same conversation as the micro-budget horror films that become cult touchstones — not because it's perfect, but because it's doing something specific and doing it with conviction.
