News

Every few years, the festival circuit does exactly what it’s supposed to do: discover an exciting new talent working within the confines of indie filmmaking in a way that feels legitimately fresh and innovative. Young filmmaker Alexander Ullom proves that he is that talent with his directorial debut It Ends, a true independent film that subverts expectations and feels subtly clever.

It Ends Review

It Ends follows four friends who find themselves in a strange dilemma: they miss their turn and end up on a road that seemingly never ends, trapped with no way out and no one but themselves and the sinister forces lurking in the woods. Ullom’s horror/thriller/psychological drama feels like it could be a lost episode of The Twilight Zone but for Gen Z, using its high-concept sci-fi premise to capture the anxieties of a generation that grew up in a post-covid world.

Writer/Director Alexander Ullom nestles an existential crisis within his genre-bending road trip thriller in his feature debut, It Ends, which he’s aptly dubbed his “horror hangout” movie. A foursome of recent college grads set out for one last hurrah before life takes them on diverging paths, but a short excursion turns into a nightmare when they find themselves instead trapped on a never-ending road. What begins as an intense horror movie settles into a meditative rhythm for an inventive slice-of-life metaphor.

The central foursome couldn’t be further apart in personality and aim. The blue collar type of the bunch and unspoken leader, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), skipped college altogether and brags about his Hvac work. Pals Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) don’t seem to have any direction post-college, yet that doesn’t seem to bother the more free-spirited pair either. That often leaves them both...

In Alexander Ullom’s “It Ends,” four friends fresh out of college find themselves on a road with no exits. It’s Jean-Paul Sartre with a Gen Z spin, a hangout horror movie rife with existential anxieties that cinema and television have been wrestling with since their inception — from Luis Buñuel to “The Good Place” — and which philosophers have pondered for much longer. That said, don’t let the familiarity of its premise fool you. It’s first and foremost a streamlined, low-budget genre thriller, albeit one whose overtly pulpy flourishes gradually reveal something more tonally surprising, dramatically complex and immensely promising for all the young talent involved.

What’s immediately striking is how quickly and economically its characters are established in medias res, through seemingly banal conversation and hints of individual personality just divergent enough to cause friction. Behind the wheel, the gruff, soft-spoken Tyler (Mitchell Cole), back from military training,...

A quartet of twenty-something friends out for a drive find themselves on a road to nowhere in first time feature director Alexander Ullom’s meditative sci-fi thriller, It Ends, premiering this week at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. Headstrong James (Phinehas Yoon), snarky Day (Akira Jackson), uptight Fisher (Noah Toth), and the pragmatic Tyler (Mitchell Cole) are heading out for a celebratory last meal as close compatriots before their impending adulthoods shoot them off into different directions for the foreseeable future. Cruising down a wooded country road, their futures seem far, far away, but when it becomes clear that this road seems to be literally unending, they have to decide how they are going to approach the rest of their lives, whatever that may mean....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

A road trip among childhood friends turns into a long drive through hell — or a glaring metaphor for the existential dread of post-college life — in director Alexander Ullom’s tense feature debut, It Ends.

Making the most out of one location, one vehicle and four actors, the film milks as much as it can out of a far-fetched scenario that keeps the suspense level relatively high, although it doesn’t amount to much once the gas runs out.

More conceptual horror than gory nail-biter, It Ends follows in the footsteps of other “It”-titled indie screamers like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night — two movies where an unexplained phenomenon transforms our darkest inner fears into deadly abstract threats. Here, the threat is so outlandish that it’s not easy to wrap your head around it, which is why Ullom deserves credit for...

The crafty but ultimately disappointing “It Ends,” which just premiered at SXSW, takes a familiar experience and throws into a cleverly existential horror premise: What if you were driving on a deserted, tree-lined road in the middle of the night — an already eerie scenario that plenty of filmmakers have used to freak people out — but the road just never ended? What if you just kept going and going for thousands of miles?

There are moments throughout Alexander Ullom’s debut feature that are genuinely unnerving, as four 20-somethings try to figure out just what the hell is going on from the confines of their white Jeep. Ullom uses the car’s features to his advantage, mining the uncomfortable glow of flashing hazard lights and the incessant beeping of an open door, for tension.

But while the movie is often cleverly spooky, it falls short in finding meaning in its fun gimmick of a setup.