It Ends review – gripping micro-budget horror ranks among the year’s best

Aug 20, 2026 - 16:07

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It Ends review – gripping micro-budget horror ranks among the year’s best

Time loops often feel like the movies’ favorite zany stylistic trick: Bill Murray plotting to win Andie MacDowell’s heart, a college student solving the mystery of her own grizzly murder, or as a ruse for Anne Hathaway to face off with a T rex. The excellent new indie horror film It Ends takes a different approach with its nightmarish depiction of a carful of friends stuck in an endlessly repeating day. It’s less of the moony japes of Groundhog Day or Palm Springs than an arthouse spin on the Prometheus myth, with the unfortunate souls of the film cursed not with death but with the torture of eternal life.

After helping their friend move into a new apartment, a crew of aimless twentysomethings take a late-night drive to get food, but after GPS leads them deeper and deeper into a desolate forest, it’s clear that they have lost their way. When they pull over, they are set upon by a group of people that look eerily similar to them – young people who are dressed like they stepped out to the corner store and couldn’t find their way back. “They look scared,” one character says with a pained expression. “Why are they scared?”

As the group swarm their Jeep every time they pull over, the central quartet has no option but to keep driving deeper and deeper into the unknown forest on a road which seemingly has no end. It turns out that even stranger things are afoot: the car’s gas dial hasn’t moved, and they oddly aren’t craving any of their normal bodily needs. “I’m not tired, not hungry, and [have] no sexual arousal,” one character informs us, just in case we were starting to wonder why no one was getting frisky in the back seat.

Made for just $50,000, there’s a palpable sense of dread to first-time director Alex Ullom’s film, mirrored by the perfectly creepy, creaky score that plays as the characters agonize over what led them to this wretched fate. Could it be a wormhole or an ancient curse? Karma for their past misdeeds? Is the doofy Tyler (Mitchell Cole) being punished for dumping a girl after she suggested a date at the local pumpkin patch, or, more gravely, is it something to do with the recent suicide attempt of Day (Akira Jackson)? In the absence of definitive answers, It Ends begins to feel oddly in sync with the kind of existentialist questions that might cross your mind on a daily basis. What’s really the difference between an endless road to nowhere and the everyday terror of hurtling towards a future where nothing is promised and everything will likely get worse?

Running counter to the ennui is the cast’s warm chemistry. Naturalistic performances anchor some of the sweetest scenes as the foursome celebrate each other’s birthdays and play made-up road trip games. (In “Like or Dislike”, they debate the merits of windshield wipers or “the ocean”.) The hatchback they live in becomes the film’s chief setting as It Ends evolves into a kind of chamber piece on wheels, with the characters decorating the insides of the vehicle with a dry erase marker so that it looks somewhere between graffiti art and the scrawlings on the wall of a cheesy movie set in a psych ward. And while Fisher (Noah Toth) seems to find some sense of zen amid the endless asphalt, James (Phinehas Yoon) wails at the sky in a plea for mercy from a higher power, in a clash of attitudes that provokes friction as well as flashes of empathy.

It’s tempting to call It Ends something like a Blair Witch take on No Exit, the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre work where a group of strangers were trapped in a room for eternity and which declared that hell was other people. But in a statement to accompany the film, director Ullom says that the film is instead rooted in his own struggle with dissociative depression and attempts to find a framework to make life survivable. If Sartre famously said that hell is other people, It Ends seems to suggest that they might be able to save us too.

Despite a few jokes that already feel dated (one character mourns that she didn’t have the foresight to download Subway Surfers), It Ends often reaches the quality of high-concept cult horror classics while also nodding to our uniquely modern malaise. “What if we’re supposed to suffer here,” says Fisher at one low moment. “What if that’s the point?” It’s unclear if he’s talking about their nightmarish road trip or what it can feel like to live on this mortal coil. It Ends is confident enough to leave the question unanswered.