It’s not even a horizon that beckons you forward, this lost highway blessed with the gradual shifts between night and day even as the forest continues, uninterrupted, and time grows all the more meaningless. The phones don’t work. The gas gauge never dips. The car continues to run. And neither you nor your friends feel hungry or need rest.
You just keep going, the aftermath of a last hurrah now given constant motion. Well, not exactly constant. You can stop for a bit, but after 90 seconds They Come For You. Incommunicative, unreasonable, teeming masses capable of of tearing flesh and haunting whatever kind of consciousness this is. Those are the rules in Alex Ullom’s It Ends, an upsetting little ice pick of existential horror that quite frankly wrecked my day.
There’s not a puzzle to be solved (the characters try). There’s not a grand realization to be made (they also theorize). For a time, it feels like a road trip riff on the vibes of Jazmin López’s 2012 triumph Leones, but there’s something very American about this story, and the quartet who make up its cast. Perhaps you can relate to an unending process that just continues on, grinding away a little bit more of who you are and what you feel with the passage of what you can’t even really call days anymore — whatever life you’ve led reduced to miles traveled and whatever you thought to immortalize on the window.
This is an elegant dive into a deep kind of incapacitating horror, like a wacky road trip that gives you Cotard’s syndrome, or a grotesque and debilitating disease that takes hundreds of years to kill you. Ullom and his cast have crafted an experience that exceeds whatever expectations you might be bringing to it, but I don’t know if I ever want to feel like this again — the deeply aware hopelessness that feels so much like being alive in this particular moment, caught in the ceaseless forward grind.
It’s not even a horizon that beckons you forward, this lost highway blessed with the gradual shifts between night and day even as the forest continues, uninterrupted, and time grows all the more meaningless.
