Neon’s Nifty New Horror Movie Should Be the Successor to Backrooms and Obsession

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Sometimes, it takes an audience to tell you how you feel. The small handful of people I saw the nifty minimalist horror movie It Ends with wasn’t enough to feel the energy in the room. But as we were waiting to leave, someone cracked a joke about us getting stuck in the elevator, the way the movie’s characters get stuck on an endless road that they are powerless to escape. That’s when I realized I was too shaken up to laugh, and so was everyone else.

The premise of Alexander Ullom’s debut is so simple it takes longer to explain than it does for the movie to establish it. Four old friends, three of them recent college graduates, take an unfamiliar turn while they’re out for a drive and find themselves on a road through the forest that seems to go on forever. There are no turnoffs, no exits, and going back the way they came brings them to a place where the road simply stops. At first, they’re panicked about starving or running out of gas, but as the hours and days accumulate, it becomes clear that neither they nor their car needs fuel. They don’t even need to sleep. So there’s nothing to keep them from hurtling onward indefinitely, just an asphalt ribbon that never goes anywhere, but never stops going.

That might, I know, sound pretty boring, which probably accounts for why It Ends ended up in the Letterboxd Video Store nine months after its premiere at SXSW. But after a week or so on the platform, it became clear that this wasn’t just another festival-circuit castoff, a promising but minor first film with a no-name cast that might one day be a footnote on someone’s Wikipedia page. Despite the fact that the movie had already been released online—and knowing that meant it had probably already been bootlegged—Neon picked it up for theatrical distribution, and though it hasn’t done anything like the theatrical business of Curry Barker’s Obsession or Kane Parsons’ Backrooms , it’s got some of the same appeal. Like Barker’s movie, Ullom’s isn’t afraid to take its time, establishing genuine characters rather than rushing a bunch of efficiently designed types into a recognizable scenario; like Parsons’, it gets at something familiar but unnamable about the modern world, particularly for people too young to have known another one.

Ullom, who is 28, finished his last semester of college just as the pandemic was ramping up, which meant the world he’d spent his life preparing his life to enter suddenly seemed to no longer exist. The quarantines had subsided by the time he started making It Ends , but the movie has the cloistered feel of a COVID-era production, with four characters trapped in a mobile bubble and the others who do eventually appear never coming closer than the dreaded six feet. The foursome—James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole)—make the most of their enforced and indefinite intimacy, coming up with games to play and even crafting memes about their bizarre experience, on the off chance they ever return to a world with internet to post them on.