It Ends

Grade: B

Those who believe in a heaven and hell after we die believe we will live forever. As a kid, I used to freak myself out when I’d think about how long forever is. It sounded scary. I might go insane, and eventually there’d come a point where I wouldn’t want to be anymore. I’ve come to realize that we’ve all experienced forever, or what I call “forever so far.” It would just be more of what we’ve already been doing.

The characters in It Ends find themselves trapped in a “forever” situation. Four friends are on a late-night food run when their GPS directs them to turn off onto a country road. After not coming across a turn for quite a while, they U-turn to go back to the main highway, only to find it dead-end into several downed trees blocking the road. That definitely wasn’t there before. They also find that if they are stopped for 90 seconds or more, they get mobbed by crazed people running out of the woods toward them, screaming for help and to be let in the car. Nothing to do except keep driving.

The gas never runs out. The people don’t get hungry, thirsty, tired, or need to take care of biological needs. They don’t have any sexual desires. Their hair doesn’t grow. They don’t get sick. I liked that these details were established, because had they remained subject to normal human necessities, it would have bogged down the movie with scenes of them stopping to pee, having a reaction to starvation, or maybe falling asleep at the wheel. And with three men and one woman in the car, I’m glad the movie establishes that sex isn’t going to become an issue. Otherwise, I’d inevitably be wondering whether one of the guys would start entertaining thoughts about doing something untoward with the woman.

Frustratingly, the film doesn’t cover all its bases by preemptively answering every question we may have. We know their phones work, because their time-killing activities include making memes and recording voice memos, but are they able to call 911 or communicate with the outside world? We don’t see them try. What would they see if they zoomed out on their Maps app? Could they drop a pin and ever return to it? A few quick lines of dialogue here and there could have taken care of many of these loose ends.

I liked that the people who emerge from the woods don’t appear to be mindless horror movie zombies or slashers. They are just stranded there for some reason, and desperately want to be picked up. It’s intriguing to ponder what would happen if the four leads were to take one of them in as a passenger. I could see it devolving into a lesser movie with an explanation dump from the stranger, so perhaps it’s just as well that writer/director Alex Ullom doesn’t explore this avenue, so to speak.

Ullom does several things to set an effective tone. There’s a haunting shot of the outside light quickly clicking from dark, to sunrise, to daylight, to sunset, to dark, and on and on. Days pass in seconds. Early on, the strings in the score play a prolonged chord. There’s no obvious bass line, and it has so many notes from the scale that I couldn’t put my finger on which note was the root of the chord. At a certain point, it rains. Also, they are suddenly able to be parked for as long as they want, with nobody running from the woods to pounce. They’re still on the road and have been for years (their mileage passes a million), but there’s humor in their excitement that something is different.

Though the experience never (or barely) changes for the characters, it did for me, at the end. Before seeing this, I couldn’t resist reading a so-called “spoiler” synopsis online. I thought I knew everything. It turns out that a little more happens after what I’d read was the end. The unknown information made me just as elated as they were when they came upon even the slightest change. I’m glad there was more. It doesn’t explain everything, but it puts a poignant button on the proceedings—and for a movie that was so literally forward-moving, it’s the closest we get to a full-circle moment.

Because of the structure, and how the pacing understandably gets repetitive, I don’t know that this would hold up as a repeat viewing for me. I’m not anxious to see it again, but it’s perfectly interesting as a one-off. It Ends leaves a lot up to us to interpret. However, I didn’t find this lazy on the filmmakers’ part. I felt like we were being invited in to figure it out together. You might not get it the same way, but I think I got it for myself.

Grade: B