You’re Not Supposed To Know How It Ends

An endless road. Screaming hordes of people emerging from a dark forest. No exit.

There’s no film out in theaters now quite like Alexander Ullom’s It Ends, an existential thriller that plays like a contemporary spin on Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic play No Exit: four friends stuck on a road that just keeps going and going, with no hope of escape. But when Ullom set out to make It Ends with $30,000 and a few of his college friends in 2022, 20th century existentialist plays were not at the top of his mind. The inspiration that sparked It Ends was his own personal crisis.

“No one was supposed to see this movie. No one was ever,” Ullom tells Inverse. “This was a 22-year-old kid with psychosis running [around] and trying to process his existential dread with his friends.”

Ullom is 28 now, and “so old,” in his own words. But that wizened age has allowed him some perspective on the dark, personal crisis he was going through a decade ago, as a young Gen Zer who “happened to be inheriting the world and happened to be moving into adulthood.”

“I was very close to the edge and I was probably thinking about not sticking around and I felt that adulthood was going to be something that was insurmountable for me to stick,” Ullom says candidly. “The rest of existence felt kind of eternal. And I think that's where some of that infinite came from.”

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, It Ends got stuck in its own kind of limbo since it premiered to rave reviews at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Letterboxd picked it up to premiere on the Letterboxd Video Store, a digital rental platform for curated unreleased independent films without distribution, but it was left without a distributor until NEON stepped in to acquire it in December 2025. Even then, It Ends premiered nearly a year later — though its release comes at an interesting time for Gen Z horror, which is experiencing its watershed moment with box office, with hits like Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Does Ullom think the success of these two Gen Z-directed thrillers helped finally get It Ends on the road to theaters?

“Obviously I'm very incredibly grateful to Curry and Kane for busting the door open,” Ullom says. “I just think that Gen Z right now is at the age where they are the dominant movers of culture. They're inheriting the economy. Hollywood has not made space for them yet, and now we're about to hit a really, really great young people movie-making renaissance.”

While It Ends seems like it could be the perfect coda to the summer of Gen Z horror, Ullom’s film, with its existential dread and nihilist gallows humor, is arguably the best of the three — at least, it’s the most successful at capturing that particular brand of Gen Z malaise. This might be because its starting point was so deeply personal for Ullom. Or maybe it’s because the ending is so maddeningly ambiguous. Ullom dives deep with Inverse on how exactly It Ends captures the Gen Z experience — and what that ending really means.

Warning! Spoilers ahead for It Ends.

It Ends Ending Explained

As college friends Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and James (Phinehas Yoon), and their old high school friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole) traverse the endless road, their attempts at making sense of — and coping with — their strange new reality slowly begin to fail. And as their in-jokes and chatter fade, and their daily screams into the void no longer work, each of the friends begin to abandon their quest, one by one. The first to go is Tyler, who leaves the car and simply ... stops. It’s implied that he becomes one of the hordes of people from the forest, who lie or sit listlessly on the ground when they’re not running screaming at the car after it stops for too long.

So who are those people, exactly? Ullom gives a somewhat vague answer: “This generation has a very hyperactive nervous system. And I think that the alternative to being in the real world and trying to accomplish your goals, or trying to move forward, is this doom-scroll feedback loop where you're just a hunger. You're just an instinct and you're just getting fed by systems that don't really care about you and are actually actively trying to reduce you to just a hunger.”

He continues, “The people know it's not even really their fault. It's just a lot of victims of circumstance and systems of power that don't really give a f*ck about an average 18-year-old. And it's just people who are lost and just trying to forage, they're just trying to get to the car. If the main characters are trying to find some semblance of structure, so are the people in the woods.”

Miles after Tyler abandons the car, Day and Fisher decide to leave together. Like Tyler, they simply get out of the car and stop, as James — the motivated friend of the group, convinced there’s a way to solve or beat the road — continues on. “James is probably me when I was 18,” Ullom says. “I've definitely had trouble releasing control of my existence to the universe, but there's parts of me in all of them for sure.”

After weeks, months, or maybe years, of driving, James passes more cars that lie abandoned on the side of the road, its drivers lying listlessly beside them. But finally, he reaches a small cul de sac which only has one sign that reads “End of the road.” With nothing else to drive towards, James pauses and turns around, and starts driving back towards his friends.

So what does this mean? “The road ends because of James,” Ullom says cryptically. “That is all I will say about that. The road ended because that's what needed to happen for James specifically.

Compared to the hopeless nihilism of the rest of the film, Ullom sees this ending as “optimistic.” He says, “It's an optimistic ending. Once he hits that dead end, he's free. He is going back.”

So is there hope for Gen Z, and this hopeless, endless world they’re set to inherit? Ullom isn’t sure if he has an answer for that, but “there's something about entering your formative years and having to choose who you're going to be for the rest of your life and choose your values and your moral structure and everything that's going to. Which is kind of unfair because you're 18 to do that.”

He adds, “And in the same way, these kids are unequipped to turn onto an endless road.”

Was This The Only Ending For It Ends?

It Ends almost had a different ending. Ullom declined to reveal what, but says that this “ended up being the ending because of how the character of James formed and what he was wanting.”

So what could’ve been an alternate ending for It Ends? “One friend kept pitching me, he's like, ‘Dude, there should just be a giant ramp. There should be a giant ramp and there's a huge cavern and James just chickens out,’” Ullom says, chuckling. But even to this day, this friend, Wes, still will come up to Ullom and say, “Should have done a ramp, dude. You should have made it a ramp."

You can still make it end with a ramp, I joke, and then it turns into Jackass. “Literally,” Ullom says with a grin.

It Ends is currently playing in theaters.