It Ends Is A Genre-Bending Head Trip — And Gen Z Horror At Its Finest
First-time director Alex Ullom taps into an unspeakable contemporary malaise with this never-ending road trip.
Horror is a genre that viewers love to classify and categorize. Oftentimes it can be intellectually rewarding to recognize trends and ideas that link certain kinds of films together — whether it be body horror, slashers, “elevated” horror — but sometimes it can be a rigid way of engaging with a work that might be too broad or too hyper-specific to pin down.
Already there are conversations grouping together the success of movies like Obsession and Backrooms to the nebulous concept of Gen Z horror, and there’s a cynical inclination to ask whether it’s motivated by Hollywood’s desire to identify a marketable niche by which to profit off how well-received those movies were with younger audiences. It’d be easy to assume that the success of those movies can be boiled down to a simple formula, a single answer that will unlock an easy path to perpetual buzz and untold riches. But as proved by It Ends, a brisk, youthful-minded indie horror flick that has fought tooth and nail to get to theaters, the genre bucks simple classification and easy answers as hard as the increasingly incomprehensible world around us.
In an interview with Slant Magazine, director Alexander Ullom described comparisons between It Ends and Backrooms as being indicative of the fact that “there’s no set direction as to where Gen Z is going.” He continues to explain that “there’s this comfort in a transitionary state because it’s become the state we exist in forever.” It’s an incredibly succinct summation of the pervading anxieties of his incredibly simple film, in which a group of friends on the cusp of real adulthood take a detour down a road that stretches on into forever.
As if preparing viewers for the lonely, Sisyphean fate awaiting them, It Ends opens with a vast night sky pierced by trees and an abandoned white Jeep, before jumping back an indiscriminate amount of time to the inside of that same vehicle (a view audiences will certainly become familiar with) parked outside an apartment complex. Recent college graduates Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and James (Phinehas Yoon) are leaving campus and heading out into the real world, and their old high school friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole) is giving them a ride home. In the midst of catching up (over a riveting intellectual discussion about a hypothetical skirmish between 50 hawks and a lone gunman), Tyler makes a turn down a forest road, and before long their conversation becomes decidedly more panicked as the group realizes their journey may never end.
It Ends teases traditional scares at first, but morphs into something far more meditative.
At first, there’s the expected confusion and terror — the first time the friends stop the car to get their bearings, they’re attacked by a horde of strangers hiding in the woods, presumably other people who got lost in the eerie liminal space. There’s an initial sense of danger and unknowability represented by the dense woods and the invisible supernatural forces at play, and while that cosmic horror-tinged air of mystery never disperses, eventually the film settles into a different kind of terror: that of endless, perpetual monotony. What happens when inexplicable pandemonium becomes the norm, when a nightmare settles into the rhythm of the everyday?
The answer is: absolutely nothing. Dance ironically in the face of your own impending mortality; make top-text bottom-text memes on your phone about the endless road; scream in the face of abject helplessness. If there’s anything that links It Ends to Backrooms, it’s the mundanity with which they both depict the senseless and unexplainable, which makes sense for a generation that has been live-tweeting what feels like the apocalypse for most of the time they’ve been alive.
Tfw making memes to ignore the crushing inescapability of the moment.
The friction between terror and acceptance gives the film’s young ensemble a lot of room to make these characters feel lived in, and the outlines of their history are the strings that become frayed by their predicament. Without ever feeling too expository, you pick up on the distance between Tyler and the others and the world-weariness in him from not going to college; you see how Day’s brush with suicidal ideation gives her a distinct perspective on their situation; you understand that James’ preconceived ideas about his life drive him to search for answers even when the others understand that they’re not coming. The film demands an emotional journey from its actors and they deliver it with remarkable depth.
The film’s visual language also undergoes a journey — the opening half is filled with the kind of intense close-ups, dark nighttime lighting, and frenzied, rapid editing you’d expect from something suspenseful and fraught, but after a period of exploration and experimentation with the logic of the woods, things start to shift. The film brightens, the forest takes on the warm affectation of a late 2010s coming-of-age hangout film, and the pacing slows down to a mundane, contemplative crawl. Even if an overreliance on shallow focus feels unintentionally monotonous at times, there’s a clear effort in the visual storytelling to convey how our characters’ relationship with their predicament is changing.
The best part of It Ends is how much interiority it gives its young cast.
The central allegory of It Ends is a sobering reflection of what it feels like to reach adulthood at a time when it feels like the central undergirding of society is collapsing, and it takes some characters longer to accept the banality of it all than others. While the industry will no doubt gladly sort it rank and file alongside this year’s other big horror successes as shining examples of “Gen Z horror,” it’s a movie that exemplifies what horror has always done well: provide a space for us to scream in terror over our anxieties about the world.
