‘It Ends’ brings ‘Backrooms’ into the backwoods

“It Ends,” a microbudget marvel by 20-something writer-director Alexander Ullom, has a straightforward premise that expands in your imagination. Four school pals — go-getter James (Phinehas Yoon), drop-out Tyler (Mitchell Cole), anxious Fisher (Noah Toth) and creative Day (Akira Jackson) — pile into a Jeep just after college graduation. The car turns onto a dark road that, to the youngsters’ growing unease, appears to stretch on forever through an infinite forest. There’s no safe place to pull over, no signs pointing toward escape, no assurance that their lives have a destination. Stop moving and a horde of desperate, violent strangers sprint from the woods to try to steal their car. Keep going ... for how long? Is this hell, purgatory or just a cosmic punchline?

“It Ends” premiered at SXSW in the spring of 2025, over a year before audiences stormed Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms,” yet the two breakout filmmakers share a suspicion that our seemingly ordinary existence hides something very, very wrong. The scale of the peril is hard to comprehend and harder to articulate; they’re more curious to explore the crisis than find a fix. What matters is that humanity feels lost.

Everyone in the car already seems to sense it even before this particular ride goes awry. Yoon’s dour James has impressively (and depressingly) mapped out his next few money-making decades down to his eventual diminished sperm count. To him, the future “seems like it sucks ass.” Weary Tyler has resigned himself to blue-collar work. Fisher and Day can’t even secure jobs, stuck literally and metaphorically frittering away their youth in the back seat.

The first act has a visceral, terrifying sequence with panicky close-ups of extras sprinting pell-mell toward the car. (The credits list as many background actors as crew members.) Matthew Robert Cooper’s unnerving ambient score bleeds into the relentless dink-dink-dink of the Jeep’s strobing hazard lights.

For several minutes afterward, the images are so disorienting that we can’t even make out where anyone in the car is sitting. Then cinematographers Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones along with Ullom, who also edits, take a steadier hand with evocative montages that emphasize the passage of time.

With rare exception, the camera stays tethered to the vehicle. The blur outside becomes enveloping and unfathomable; the universe inside the car evolves as the friends invent tension-defusing rituals to keep from screaming at one another. The mood toggles between cozily habituated and heavy. How long have they been driving now?

Early on, I kept a running tally of the hours until that began to feel naive. The days blend together with no time stamps, although Ullom occasionally reveals how many miles the car has gone. I did some back-of-my-notepad math and realized you can drive massive distances faster than I would have guessed. Then I pictured myself in their seats. Excruciating.

Evading plot holes, “It Ends” paves over the obvious biological needs. The foursome discover they no longer need to eat or drink. Likewise, the car no longer needs gas. The characters check off every idea you want them to try in the small space of the car, plus other brilliant brainstorms. Bursting through the confinements of movie logic, “It Ends” untrains audiences out of their certainty that every crisis has a solution. Does it even matter what they do?

Dread runs through “It Ends,” yet I’m hesitant to frame it as a horror movie. Scares fall by the wayside when it shifts into a more philosophical gear, vibrating with questions about how to live a meaningful life: Should these victims accept their fate or keep struggling? At least one will leave the car, never to be seen again as Ullom shrewdly refuses to reveal whether that choice was right. I think the filmmaker has an answer for himself, but he’d rather ask how we feel about it. Keep an open mind. Your opinion may change more than once.

Tribune News Service