Director: Alexander Ullom
Writer: Alexander Ullom
Stars: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth
Synopsis: Friends on a late-night food run become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape.
Fresh off a buzzing premiere at SXSW, Alexander Ullom’s It Ends has arrived at the Fantasia International Film Festival, and the venue couldn’t have been better for the movie to have its international premiere. After all (I may be biased, living in Montreal), the Fantasia audience is the most receptive, especially when a movie really works. In the case of Ullom’s directorial debut, It Ends smartly reinvents tropes that were all too familiar within the time loop subgenre by simply modifying one element to freshen up its approach.
Instead of having the main characters relive the same day over and over again, Ullom has a group of friends, comprised of James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), trapped inside a road that never ends. Perhaps it will ultimately lead them to the beach that makes you old, but I digress. The quartet of friends has no idea why they are stuck in this perpetual loop, and it gets even stranger when many horrifying things begin to happen outside their car door.
That’s as far as I’ll go in describing the plot of a movie that works best if you know nothing about It Ends other than its main conceit. And for 87 efficient minutes, Ullom approaches his framing device in constantly surprising ways, whether in its stark aspect ratio shifts, strange, but oddly endearing needle-drops, and even fluctuations in perspective as we get to experience how each character feels when they realize there’s no way out of the predicament they’re in.
The movie often flows through one register to another, beginning on a more light-hearted note until things take a turn for the worse, and each protagonist has no idea how they will ever be able to make it out of a road that doesn’t seem to have a way out. The woods are trapped, and the road doesn’t have any curves. It’s a straight line to infinity. How do the characters reckon with a situation that has no way out? Do they give up, or attempt to find a solution? I don’t want to reveal anything, but the way in which Ullom opens up his film, particularly in its affecting and heartbreaking final section, will quietly blow you away, especially when you realize what this never-ending road actively represents.
What’s most interesting about the film is how it can be unpacked in various ways. There’s no one way to interpret what the road (and the characters’ decisions) means. I’ll be as vague as possible, but there’s a clear way in which many will perceive this film, and once you’re set in this analysis, It Ends will have a much different meaning for you than someone who imbues their own subjectivity on what the road actively means for them, and the characters. The beauty of a film like this is that there is no right or wrong approach to perceiving this story, because such an event will happen to all of us, whether we want to or not.
When one realizes this, it’s hard to look away from It Ends, even if Ullom concludes his movie on the biggest of whimpers, with many lingering questions still left to be answered. Still, the rock-solid alchemy between the four leads can’t be overstated. When they ponder what their life ultimately means now that they are stuck inside never-ending purgatory, you’ll feel what they feel. When they scream in agony, not knowing how to get out of this, you’ll also be inclined to do the same. There’s something so profoundly moving about Ullom’s film that you won’t realize until far into the movie, where the somewhat comedic conclusion has layers of melancholy buried within it. Once you begin to excavate them, the emotional result is devastating.
It then becomes hard to resist this daring proposition, even if the movie may not be as developed as it should be. But it almost doesn’t matter, because what’s laid out in front of us is such a powerful debut that one immediately knows Ullom is destined for greatness, way beyond the Fantasia and SXSW walls. Even better: it delivers on its title. We were promised that It Ends. And it ends. Few movies actually give us what we paid for. Ullom was clear that it was going to happen – and it did. Isn’t that incredible?
