‘It Ends’ Review: An Endless Road Trip That Somehow Never Overstays Its Welcome

There is a particular anxiety that settles in after college ends, when the people who filled your days suddenly scatter and the future stops feeling like a plan and starts feeling like a void. Alexander Ullom’s debut feature ‘It Ends’ takes that anxiety and traps it inside a Jeep Cherokee on a highway with no exit ramp. Four recent grads set out for a late night food run and instead find themselves circling a stretch of road that refuses to end, and what follows is less a traditional horror movie than a slow unraveling of who these people actually are once escape stops being an option.

Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole carry the film almost entirely through their dynamic with one another, and that dynamic has to work because there is nowhere else for the camera to go. Shot largely from inside the vehicle by cinematographers Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones, the film leans on close, claustrophobic framing that turns every glance and every silence into something loaded. Ullom also edited his own script, and that hands on control shows in how confidently the film paces its dread against its humor.

What struck me most is how patient the film is willing to be with its own premise. Rather than racing toward jump scares or a tidy explanation for the road that will not end, ‘It Ends’ lets its characters bicker, joke, and slowly crack under the pressure of infinite time together, and the horror creeps in through that erosion rather than through anything jumping out of the dark. It plays like a hangout movie that gradually realizes it is trapped in a nightmare, and that tonal balancing act is genuinely difficult to pull off on a feature this small in scale.

The film does ask for patience that not every viewer will want to give. Its middle stretch spends a long time in the characters’ philosophical spirals, and there were moments where I wanted the film to tighten its grip rather than let another round of circular conversation play out. A few supporting figures who drift into the story from outside the Jeep also feel thinner than the core four, more like symbolic props for the group’s unraveling than fully drawn people in their own right.

Even with those stretches, the emotional throughline never lets go. The film understands that the scariest thing about your twenties is not a monster on the road but the creeping suspicion that you might already be exactly where you will always be, and it turns that idea into something that lingers well past the credits. Matthew Robert Cooper’s score threads through the quieter scenes with a hum that keeps the unease present even when nothing overtly frightening is happening on screen.

For a project built on what its own director has called a shoestring budget assembled through odd jobs and favors, the craft on display here is remarkably assured. Ullom spoke about the scrappy nature of financing the film during an appearance on The Moveable Fest, describing the unlikely path that got the movie made at all. That resourcefulness never reads as a limitation once the film is actually running, since the confinement of the Jeep becomes a strength rather than a workaround.

I walked away from ‘It Ends’ thinking less about the specific scares and more about the specific ache it captures, the one that shows up right after you realize adulthood is not a finish line but another road with no clear end. It is a confident, melancholy, occasionally very funny debut that trusts its actors and its atmosphere over spectacle, even when its midsection wanders a bit longer than it needs to. My final verdict lands at 8.5 out of 10, a striking arrival for a first time filmmaker who clearly has more where this came from.

Did the endless highway of ‘It Ends’ get under your skin the way it got under mine, or did you find yourself wanting out of that Jeep sooner? Let me know in the comments.