AUSTIN – Four young friends on the cusp of the rest of their lives get stuck on an unending forest road that seemingly goes nowhere. They drive on and on, the dorky jokes they initially share together fading almost entirely from the mind as they realize this is all there is. If they stop driving to observe the world around them, take a moment to find a sliver of joy, scream out their pent-up frustrations, or even just try to rest, strikingly shot hordes of people will come pouring out from the trees that surround the road to try to pull them out of the car to then themselves get in. This is the existential nightmare at the heart of “It Ends,” the fascinating feature debut from writer-director Alex Ullom that not just marks him as a filmmaker to watch, but gives life to the dread of what it means to be a young person in the world today.
It’s a simple yet effectively haunting work that’s well-shot, written, and acted across the board, especially for a first feature that takes on as much as this does. Even as its more than a little scrappy, it’s still the discovery of this year’s SXSW Film and TV Festival. It also not only gets better as it goes along, with the agonizing repetition of the experience proving to be precisely the grim point, but finds surprising resonances that get at something truthful about what it means to find meaning in a bleak world where there may be none. 
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All of these ideas are ones none of the travelers on the never-ending road, James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), were expecting to confront when they set out on their drive. But much like life, this journey has other plans for them that they’ll have to face down whether they like it or not. As the film goes from them methodically testing the limits of what they find themselves trapped in to accepting it as being something they can’t easily escape and then finding their own ways of living with it, it shifts from merely being a more broad horror film to something closer to a meditation on the dark mundanity of what existing requires.
It isn’t pedantic about this, with each character proving distinct in how they hold vastly different perspectives on the slow-rolling crisis and all the performances are naturalistic in a way that feels completely authentic to their generation. Rather than feel like it was written by outsiders looking in, Ullom’s film is true to each of his passengers and their unending struggle, ensuring we get completely swept up in the journey along with them. There are moments of bleak silliness, like when they share what feels like a slightly outdated collection of memes but actually fit perfectly for the moment, which then gets folded into the cosmic joke of it all that starts to wear each of them down. 
As a result, the film can feel much longer than it is in reality. However, this is not a bug, but a feature. Having watched the film now twice, which I understand may sound like a maddening thing to do considering the subject matter, though it is a grimly fitting exercise for a film about how everything repeats itself, I found most of the reservations I had about whether it was dragging a bit to fade away. Still, it’s only when we see all the characters become completely and utterly existentially exhausted that we feel it begins to cut deeper. Where a lesser version of this could get too caught up in itself and the philosophical underpinnings of its various characters’ perspectives, Ullom always keeps it grounded in the personal. It’s a film that’s less about solving a mystery or tying itself up in a neat bow than it is about patiently observing the toll it takes on the characters.
At one turning point midway through the film when they have been on the road for who knows how long, a both gently graceful and grim score by Matthew Robert Cooper pushes the film into more petrifying yet still oddly poetic territory. It’s a scene that not only provides an effective encapsulation of how easily time can grow hazy and blur together when you have to keep plodding along with one day looking exactly like the one before it, but it also is where we start to genuinely get into something more reflective. As Ullom smartly doesn’t explain any of what’s going on or, for the most part, what any of it means, this leaves the characters each trying to do the best they can to fill it in. We hear the combination of desperation and resignation creeping into their voices despite their attempts to find levity where they can, ensuring the moments where they stop doing so hit hard. After all, is being an adult not partly about pretending that all is okay even when it is very much not? That there are large stretches where there is little, if any, joy to be easily found?
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While this could be blunt in less confident hands, Ullom hands it delicately, letting the reflections on life the characters develop tumble out naturally when they each reach their respective breaking points. It’s frequently riveting stuff where the metaphor being deployed never offers clear answers other than that there may be no answers. It creates some genuine effect as all the characters must come to confront loss on the road while never falling into being wholly nihilistic or, most critically, fatalistic about it all. Instead, Ullom has a deep compassion for his characters that is as unending as the road they find themselves on. Without ever falling into being more sentimental and tempering the sinister sense of despair as you watch the characters unravel, it increasingly taps into something honest about how there is something still worth living for in those we care about.
There is a big, dark final joke that awaits us on the road, which lands perfectly, but it’s also then about finding another way onward in the aftermath. There is no neat or grand catharsis to this, but instead a steady accumulation of smaller ones that become something great all the same when brought together. That the final familiar question the film asks also provides an answer that may have been there all along only makes it that much more of a transcendentally bittersweet truth to behold. [A-]
“It Ends” had its World Premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
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