‘It Ends’ is a Never-Ending Road Trip of Gen Z Angst

There is something uniquely terrifying about realizing nothing is actually chasing you. No monster. No killer. No ticking clock. Just you, your friends, and a single road that never seems to end. That is the unnerving setup behind Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, a low-key cosmic horror film about four recent graduates who take what should be one last carefree drive together and instead find themselves trapped on an endless two-lane road with no exits, no signal, no hunger, and seemingly no way forward except… forward.

The film starts small. Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), James (Phinehas Yoon), and Day (Akira Jackson) are exactly the kind of friends who can spend a ridiculous amount of time arguing over whether you’d rather have gorillas or crows defend you in a fight. They feel young in that very specific way where everyone is loud, overconfident, and still figuring out who they are. Each falls neatly into a type. Tyler is the stoic one, evasive about his future and seemingly the most grounded. Fisher is loud and goofy, the guy who will die on the dumbest hill imaginable. James is the smart-ass who thinks he knows everything, while Day often becomes the mediator, siding with whoever currently has the strongest argument.

Then Tyler ignores the GPS, makes a turn, and everything goes wrong. The road dead-ends even though he is convinced they came from that direction. Their phones stop working. The GPS insists they can keep driving straight. When they stop the car, a mob of screaming people suddenly charges toward them begging for help. This is when the real nightmare begins. Hours pass, but the gas tank never empties. Nobody gets tired. Nobody gets hungry. The scenery refuses to change. There are no turns. There is no recognizable destination. Eventually, the group starts wondering whether they are dead.

This is where It Ends becomes much more interesting than its horror premise suggests. The movie is less concerned with explaining the mechanics of the road than watching these four people slowly process the possibility that this might simply be their existence now. And really, isn’t that adulthood? You keep moving because stopping feels worse. Friends peel away. People choose different directions. Some adapt. Some refuse to. Some stay beside you longer than expected, and others hop off before you are ready.

The road becomes a blunt but effective metaphor for that post-graduation anxiety. These characters are entering the stage of life where the friend group is no longer guaranteed. Careers, relationships, geography, and different versions of adulthood begin pulling everyone apart. Moving forward is scary. Stagnation is worse. The film’s strongest quality is the growing sense of existential dread. The four friends keep expecting something external to reveal itself as the enemy, but the real threat is time, or maybe the absence of it. How long can people remain themselves when nothing changes?

The middle does lose some steam, although strangely, that almost works. Repetition becomes part of the experience. The characters get bored. The audience gets restless. Everyone wants something to change. That exhaustion mirrors the endlessness of the road itself.

Visually, though, the movie has the frustrating problem of sometimes being too dark. Not emotionally. Literally. The night photography is so underexposed in places that I repeatedly wanted someone to reach over and turn the exposure up. Darkness can create atmosphere, but there are moments where it simply obscures what is happening. Still, It Ends understands something painfully simple. Every road ends eventually.

We all arrive at the same final destination. The part we actually control is who stays in the car with us, who leaves, and whether we spend the entire ride terrified of what comes next. For a movie about people going nowhere, It Ends has quite a bit to say about moving on.