You’re in a car on a dark backwoods road. You’re with your closest friends. You’re lost.
The turn you’re waiting to take never comes. Nothing ever comes. The road stays straight and it goes on forever and you can never stop to rest for long or a small army of desperate, crazed maniacs will burst from the surrounding woods to tear the flesh from your body.
It’s either the kind of terrifying stress-induced nightmare that a psychologist would have a field day with, or it’s the new road trip/psych-thriller film “It Ends,” from writer/director Alexander Ullom, opening Friday, August 28th at AMC Quail Springs in OKC.
At a tight, taut 89 minutes, Ullom’s existentialist nightmare wastes little time on exposition, opening already inside the car that’ll be the primary stage for the next hour and a half.
We’re introduced to Tyler, James, Day, and Fisher, four tight-knit college friends in their early-20s all right on the cusp of venturing out into the real world and starting down the straight line of adult life.
They cram into Tyler’s jeep, hit the gas for a food run, and before they know it, they’re lost and helpless on the endless road, nothing but woodland-lined pavement as far as the eye can see and farther than the mind can comprehend.
They turn back to follow their entry back out, but hit an unexplainable dead end in the direction they came from. While they’re standing around trying to make sense of it, that’s when the maniacal swarm first attacks.
Cram back into the jeep. Follow the road in the only direction it heads. No hunger, so no need to eat. Don’t get tired and can’t sleep. Don’t ever need gas, just infinite driving in one direction. Don’t stop too long. Don’t let the questions and the terror and the overwhelming lack of meaning drag you down.
Before you ask, yes. That’s the entire premise, setting, and stakes of “It Ends,” and that realization settles into the audience’s mind just as it settles into the four friends, with a rapidly creeping sense of the mind-numbing monotony and a debilitating existential question of “why?”
From there, it’s an endurance test. It’s about who can make it and for how long. It’s all slowly fraying sanities and weakening wills.
It’s an admittedly ingenious way to compose a micro-budget thriller. All Ullom needs is a car, a solid stretch of road, and four particularly game leads. The rest of the experience is all in the dialogue and in the slow-settling insanity that’s crawling in among the clever cinematography, the wonderfully creative rear-projected scenery from inside the jeep, and the ambient score that signals longing and pain much more than fear.
Each pillar of the four-cornered ensemble carries their weight well, though it feels like Phinehas Yoon is the undisputed standout as the willfully internal and intellectual-to-a-fault James, the one member of the crew that tries hardest to think his way out of the endless drive, invoking everything from religious repentance to the Socratic method.
It’s all very Sartre, of course, existentialist trappings and the futility of understanding, but unlike “No Exit,” Hell is decidedly not other people in Ullom’s film. In fact, the bond of friendship and shared experience is the only positive constant in their endless-road nightmare.
No, in “It Ends,” Hell is the absence of other people, the loss and the letting go.
It’s a wildly divisive film, it seems, with a lot of viewers finding the premise thin, the proceedings boring, and the whole thing pointless and (ironically?) without direction.
I disagree.
While the first half focuses most heavily on the friend group dynamic and the sinking terror of the premise, the actual point and purpose of the story isn’t revealed until the halfway mark. If you get it, then you get it. If you don’t, then sure, it might all feel meaningless.
But it’ll be a shame if you don’t understand what Ullom is trying to say and what he’s interpreting with the highway, because it turns out to be one of the best metaphors imaginable for the ever-barreling straight line of time and the fraught, frantic momentum of hope and stubborn will.
Hope is the antagonist of “It Ends.” It’s hope that keeps pushing them forward down the road with no expectation of anything ever changing, but with a nagging, gnawing hope that maybe it will.
The rare straight-up scares come from the attacking woods-dwellers, but the real existential horror comes from the moments when hope is no longer strong enough to motivate the friends and the promise of something better – or even just something different – is no longer enough to propel them forward.
We’ve all had friends that we’ve lost along the road, companions that we thought would be around for the long haul, but that simply stopped and decided to stick to the hell they know rather than risk whatever might be waiting down the road.
It’s all part of life. It’s all part of time.
Ullom himself is staring down 30 soon, and there’s something palpable here that feels like a 20-something’s fears of life after the 20s, when the adventure and the unexpected turns and intriguing intersections begin to straighten out and lose their appeal. It’s the kind of feeling that starts the day you say goodbye to college and begin drifting apart from your friends.
Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe it’s as inescapable as a straight road.
But if there’s one thing that’s always true of any road, any friendship, any life, and any time itself, it’s that it ends.
“It Ends” opens Friday, August 28th at AMC Quail Springs in Oklahoma City, distributed by NEON.
For times, tickets, and more, visit amctheatres.com.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
