It Ends review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.30.26
★★★★ 4 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Four young friends discover that the road home simply will not end, turning an ordinary drive into an increasingly existential test of how long people can remain trapped with one another and keep moving. The actors have the chemistry needed to sustain such a confined premise, and Alexander Ullom lets their conversations and relationships evolve without stretching the movie past its natural length. It Ends has the distinct voice of young filmmakers rather than an older industry imitation of them. Some viewers may find the repetition monotonous; I found it thoughtful, timely and remarkably absorbing.
Full review — contains spoilers
Love this one. Three friends in their early twenties are coming home from college and their buddy is picking them up. They’re driving and eventually realize they can’t reach their destination. They can’t get off the road. They try things, they keep driving, and the road keeps going. That’s your movie. They’re trapped on an endless road with nothing but each other, and after a while it gets really existential.
They drive for hours, then days, and eventually the amount of time they’ve been out there just becomes absurd. There’s another part of the conceit that keeps them from just stopping, and I’d leave that out of any plot description because it’s better to find out when they do. The important thing is that they have to keep moving.
So the question stops being how to get off the road and becomes how long you personally could do this. How long could you sit in a car with the same three people, alternating drivers, talking, sleeping, waking up to a road that still doesn’t end? At what point do you just accept that you’re never getting off? I thought that was really smart.
The whole movie depends on you being willing to sit in that car with these people, and the actors have the chemistry to carry it. You can tell two of them have dated. One is basically the asshole of the group, and he stays the asshole. I’ve seen people criticize the movie for not giving him some kind of transformation, and I don’t need that. Sometimes your asshole friend just stays your asshole friend. That’s how he is.
Alexander Ullom wrote and directed this, and I think he did a really good job. This is another one of these Gen Z productions that feels different from how established Hollywood would have handled the same premise. It fits the cultural moment really well. We’ve been getting more of that lately with things like Backrooms and Obsession, younger filmmakers making things that actually come from their own generation instead of somebody older trying to write young people. It Ends isn’t going as big as those movies, and it doesn’t need to.
They also got the length right. It’s about an hour and a half, which is exactly what this needed. There’s an inherent monotony to a movie about people driving endlessly down a road. Make it two hours and 20 minutes and I may personally want out of the car. They don’t do that. The conversations change, the relationships change, and the way the characters understand what’s happening changes, so I never got bored.
I know critics liked this and audiences have been more mixed. I understand why some people find it monotonous because that’s built into the premise. I didn’t. I thought this was thoughtful, really well done, and I recommend it a lot.