It Ends review: Gen Zs disillusionment is distilled in a mind-snapping road trip thriller

It should have been a simple road trip, the kind where you ask each other silly hypothetical questions, eat junk food, and make memories that get foggy yet more glorious in the recounting.

But It Ends, the directorial debut of writer/helmer/editor Alexander Ullom, takes this setup down a merciless road, where such joys are hard to come by.

The premise seems deceptively simple: Four childhood friends on a road trip find themselves on an endless road, where there's no chance to turn off.

And every time they stop, they are rushed by strangers, who race screaming out of the surrounding woods.

In such a scenario, what path is left for the group except forward? And what does that look like? Well, for starters: grim.

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College has just concluded, and thus it's time for James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) to move out of their dorms and onto the next chapter in their lives.

Who better to transport them than their childhood buddy Tyler (Mitchell Cole)? While they were off getting a degree, he was learning how to be a grown-up without one.

In the front seat, Tyler keeps his eyes on the road, while his friends bounce about a familiar internet hypothetical.

50 hawks, 5 gorillas, one gun-toting man, 10,000 mice.

Choose two groups to defend you against the other two.

While aspiring graphic designer Day and chipper Fisher argue playfully, James, who has his white-collar life mapped out from shitty first apartment to six-figure salary and happy nuclear family, is dryly judgmental of their logic and the question itself.

On its surface, it's a petty disagreement.

But it's one that becomes reflective of the four's dynamic as a whole.