Synopsis: Four recent graduates take a late-night drive for food, make one wrong turn, and find themselves on a two-lane road that refuses to end.
Stars: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole
Director: Alexander Ullom
Rated: R (pervasive language)
Running Length: 89 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: A micro-budget debut that turns an endless highway into a study of how long people will keep driving toward nothing. Patient, dread-soaked, and one of the year’s best arguments for seeing a film with somebody you can argue with afterward. 
It Ends Review: A Film About What Isn't Happening
I can absolutely see someone walking into It Ends expecting the sort of horror NEON has been championing and coming out frustrated. Not a lot happens across these 89 minutes. But that’s the point. The film is about what isn’t happening, and for an audience trained to expect a jolt every few minutes, that’s a tough sell.
I don’t say that as a dig at younger viewers. It’s an observation about how all of us have been taught to consume movies.
My guess is It Ends plays best for people with an appetite for existential dread. If you have time for Melancholia, The Void, Event Horizon, Under the Skin, The Road, Aniara or Threads, you already speak this language. Writer-director Alexander Ullom has made something that looks at first like it has nowhere to go. It’s actually saying quite a bit about the world we’re living in and how long some of us will last in it. It’s also about what we choose to ignore, accept or simply endure.
Four Actors, One Jeep, Ninety Seconds
Four recent grads head out for food. Tyler picks up James, Day and Fisher, they take a wrong turn, and the two-lane road in front of them stops having an end. The gas gauge never moves. The engine never dies. Nothing about the situation makes sense, and worst of all, they can’t stop for longer than 90 seconds before some…thing finds them.
I won’t say what that something is. Ullom introduces it well and keeps bringing it back in increasingly clever ways, and it’s where the film locates most of its scares. It’s also, I suspect, why NEON moved on this the way it did.
With four people carrying an entire feature, the casting has to be right, and it is. Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth and Mitchell Cole are completely believable as friends who have known each other long enough to have running bits. Jackson emerges as the strongest voice of the four. Cole is making his feature acting debut, which I would not have guessed.
Too Far In to Turn Around
What elevates this above a monster picture is the idea sitting underneath it. The endless highway is what it feels like to be twenty-two and too far into something to quit. You’ve poured years into a path, a relationship, a plan. Turning back would mean admitting all of it was wasted, so you keep driving instead.
The characters split into the two responses people actually have to that. Some read the room early and accept a hard truth. Others need the literal wall. They have to run the tank dry and hit the dead end before the illusion breaks. Ullom keeps the nature of the road ambiguous on purpose, because the horror isn’t what’s waiting at the end of it. The horror is our refusal to stop driving.
Eighty Thousand Dollars and Three Years
The making of this thing deserves its own film. Ullom spent roughly two and a half years in development, mostly fundraising and treading water. The break came through a Florida State University alumni program that gave him studio space and equipment.
He shot the first version for about $30,000. The crew wore every hat available. Producer Carrie Carusone doubled as production designer. Co-producer Evan Barber served as first assistant director. They cast largely through Instagram, stayed in vacant houses and cooked their own crew meals. The film takes place almost entirely inside a Jeep Cherokee. To shoot the driving safely, they disassembled a car to get it into the FSU soundstage.
Then Ullom looked at the rough cut and knew it wasn’t done. He screened a 20-minute sequence in the living room of an online acquaintance, a magician interested in his work. He walked out with enough money for seven more days. Snoot Entertainment backed the later reshoots. Total budget landed around $80,000 across roughly three years and two rounds of additional shooting.
Two cinematographers, Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones, shot it, and Matthew Robert Cooper wrote the score. Ullom edited it himself, so the writing, directing and cutting are all one person’s judgment. That shows in the pacing.
Go See It With Someone You Can Argue With
The distribution story is nearly as good. It Ends premiered at SXSW in March 2025 and spent the year on the festival circuit. Lacking a theatrical deal, it became a launch title for the new Letterboxd Video Store on December 10, 2025. It sat on the first “Unreleased Gems” shelf. NEON bought worldwide rights eight days later.
That’s a genuinely new pipeline. A film with no distributor went straight to an audience that talks, and the talking did the work. Five titles from that first shelf have since found wider distribution.
So set aside some time for this one, and ideally see it with someone you can talk to afterward. It asks interesting questions at a moment when we seem increasingly reluctant to ask hard ones. And it lands on the most unsettling idea in horror, which isn’t that something terrible will happen. It’s that nothing will.
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