A road with no exit sounds simple. That’s the trap “It Ends” sets, and mostly springs on itself.
Alexander Ullom directs and writes this horror-mystery about four recent graduates who take a late-night drive for food and never make it back. James, Day, Fisher, and Tyler pile into a vehicle for one last gathering before life pulls them apart, and instead find a two-lane road that refuses to end. Forces beyond their understanding, without names, mostly unseen, wait on either side of the pavement. The idea is lean and good. The execution is not.
Trailer, via NEON.
The Vehicle
Most of “It Ends” happens inside that vehicle, and Ullom leans into the tightness of it. Phinehas Yoon’s James, Akira Jackson’s Day, Noah Toth’s Fisher, and Mitchell Cole’s Tyler are stuck elbow to elbow while the world outside stretches into nothing recognizable. That’s a real setup for dread — a friend group with nowhere to put their bodies, nowhere to look but at each other and the road.
The line the film gives itself sets the stakes plainly:
Some wrong turns last forever.
For a while, the film earns that line. The four leads read like people who actually know each other, tired and joking in the way you only are with friends about to lose each other to distance and time. The premise itself — a drive for food, a group about to part ways — carries the early stretch before the road stops behaving like a road.
Fisher’s Mom
The film’s better instincts show up in its margins. Jenny Doyle voices Fisher’s Mom, a presence that never appears in person but still manages to trouble the viewer. Jon Linstad plays an Interrogated Man in a role the film keeps vague on purpose. Both are credited supporting figures, and both hint at a bigger, stranger structure sitting just outside the vehicle’s windows — a structure “It Ends” never quite lets the viewer see clearly enough to fear properly.
Here’s where the film’s ambitions run ahead of its length. At 89 minutes, there isn’t room to build out the scale the film’s setup gestures at.
The choice facing the four friends — accept the road as their new life or fight to escape it — never gets the weight it needs. It’s stated more than shown.
The Road Itself
A short list of what works and what doesn’t in “It Ends”:
- The tightness of the vehicle setting — the film’s strongest and most steady point.
- The chemistry among Yoon, Jackson, Toth, and Cole — true, lived-in, worth caring about.
- The voice work from Doyle as Fisher’s Mom — strange and effective in small doses.
- The forces the film’s own description promises — not explained enough on screen.
- The ending — a choice between two states of being that never earns its weight.
That order shows where the film’s care and imagination went, and where they didn’t.
Ullom is a capable enough director of small spaces and tired faces. He’s less sure-footed once the film has to face what, exactly, is out there on that road. The mystery side wants a slow reveal; the horror side wants a hard blow. “It Ends” keeps promising both and delivers neither with enough force to satisfy.
Rated R, the film isn’t shy about its horror elements, but the rating buys it less freedom than expected. The film’s own description promises a two-lane nightmare of untold horrors and forces beyond understanding, yet what reaches the screen stays restrained, which weakens a premise that’s really about being trapped somewhere hostile and without end.
This is a film that understands its own hook — a road that won’t end, four friends who cannot get out — better than it understands what to do with it once the hook is set. The mood holds for a while. The momentum doesn’t.
James, Day, Fisher, and Tyler
The four leads deserve credit for carrying a film that asks a lot of them with very little else to work with. The chemistry among them is the film’s most reliable point, though the writing doesn’t give them more to push against once the horror starts.
Right now, “It Ends” sits at a 5.3 out of 10 audience score on TMDB, drawn from 35 votes, and that number feels about right for where the film lands — not a disaster, not a discovery. No wider critical word has landed yet, so take this as an early read rather than a settled verdict. The film is now in cinemas, and it’s worth seeing for the setup and the cast chemistry alone, if you go in knowing the back half won’t pay off everything the front half sets up.
Ullom has a good eye for confinement and a decent ear for tired, funny talk among friends about to drift apart in any case. What he doesn’t yet have is a hold on scale — on making an endless road feel endless, or making forces beyond understanding feel like more than a line in the film’s own description. “It Ends” wants to be a horror movie about being unable to leave. It mostly succeeds at being a movie about four people stuck in a vehicle, which is a smaller, sadder thing than what it’s reaching for.
