(By http://www.impawards.com/2025/it_ends_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82428273)
No. Not really.
I was intrigued by this film’s conceit–characters get stuck driving on an endless road. It’s part of the newish “liminal spaces” sub-genre. It reminded me a little of the 2019 film Vivarium, which shows a married couple getting trapped in some enormous empty suburban neighborhood for years. Vivarium was tedious, dry, and unfulfilling, though it at least had a suitably creepy conclusion.
It Ends really reminds me more of The Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search on Exit.” An episode that made great creative work of a very limited stage setting by including five unique characters, and one hell of a twist ending that I’m pretty sure had to have inspired the idea for Toy Story.
Really, it’s easier to sort spooky films these days into the category of those that weren’t inspired by Rod Serling’s classic TV series. And that would be a small list.
It Ends features four diverse characters, three guys and a girl, on a road trip after finishing college, who after taking a turn on a road through the woods discover that it seemingly has no ending. But not to worry. They don’t feel hungry. They don’t get tired. They don’t seem to feel much of anything, actually. If they stop the vehicle, strange people from the woods wake up and start running after them screaming, and try to rip them apart. So the foursome has to keep driving and driving if they want to survive. But where is this road taking them? Who put them on it? And why are people chasing them everytime they stop?
This was an unsatisfying film, overall, that offers little answers or resolution. Which is something you can do if your film is an artistic puzzle that’s meant to evoke individual intepretations. Such as Blue Velvet. It Ends is very minimalist and utilitarian, similar to the run of very contained thrillers in the early twenty teens, like the Ryan Reynold’s film Buried.
And it seems content not to offer any explanations, instead wanting to present a metaphor something or other about the mundanity of the adult world. The characters are suitably Gen-Z. Passionless. Devoid of any sexual agency. Suffering from various mental problems and insecurities. Automotons. If you’re going to present neurotic young adult characters, at least make them entertaining. I felt like I’d seen all these character types in films before.
I’m a fan of this budding liminal spaces sub-genre. I enjoyed Backrooms this year for the most part, and all the YouTube content built up around the creepypasta. My favorite book recently is Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell, which deserves a cinematic release. It’s an attractive genre not just because it’s in vogue now but also because it’s high-concept and low-budget–the producer’s dream.
I just wish there had been more variety in It Ends. More menace, murder, anything. It needed to be nastier. Look at how much juice was wrung out of the 22-minute Twilight Zone episode. After a few scares in the first act it largely peters out until coming to a plopping end. There were so many realistic ways to go that could have livened it up. I mean, if four people were stuck on the same road forever, they’d eventually go so batty they’d be trying to kill each other. Instead these four just catatonically keep going forward. I just feel a lot was left on the table. At the least, there needed to be an impactful twist ending.
