Curiously not related to Mitchell’s It Follows, even thought this one (directed and written by Alexander Ullom) is also a “coming of age” story. Sorta.
Four friends fresh off graduation meet together and travel via car to help move furniture out, but their trip, starting off as them basically lambasting each other, develops into an unexplicable nightmare as the next turn never comes, the road stretching in a seemingly infinite straightaway, all even more confusing since there seem to be little to no rules or logic to this world of a single straight road stretching into an infinite sea of trees, always railroading into moving “forwards”…
It Ends is basically bloodless, there’s no real “monsters”, jumpscares or barely anything in the way of physical violence, heck, its not even really trying to go rth “A24 way”, yet it is horror, existentialist horror, as the friends try to survive not so much the barely present physical traumas, but the endless, psychological violence brought upon by unexplicable nature of this “liminal roadtrip”, as they keep trying to rationalize it in vain, making it even more grueling of a struggle for sanity or some sense.
Which thankfully is never compromised just to give audiences a sop, since the whole film is an allegory for how difficult it can be to handle friendship in that akward post-teenage phase of lide where you haven’t quite entered adulthood yet.
So it makes sense for the main “meat” to be indeed the drama, the characters interacting and arguing with each other, and the director did manage to make this and the “single location” format work pretty well, though i do think it was smart to keep the runtime very short, just 90 minutes, since the pacing can be slow in the second act.
Quite good debut film.
