Road Trip: Film Review of It Ends
★★★☆
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
In the film Groundhog Day, protagonist Phil (Bill Murray) is caught in some sort of metaphysical time loop and forced to relive one particular day—Groundhog Day—over and over again. Trying everything from larceny to suicide as ways to find release from the monotony of the never-ending series of loops his life has become, Phil finally discovers he can find release and meaning through kindness and the power of love. It’s a happy ending.
There is no such solution in Alexander Ollum’s film It Ends. Characterized as both a horror film and a “Kafkaesque fever dream” this movie is a surreal allegory of the barren hopes and endless anxiety of young people facing a harrowing and emotionally bankrupt future. In the vein of some of the recent crop of existential horror films like Obsession and Backrooms, It Ends implicitly addresses not just general existential issues, but also probes issues of despair, isolation, and abandonment in the lives of Generation Xers.
At the beginning of the film, Tyler (Mitchell Cole) helps his friends James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) move James into his new apartment. The four of them go out to eat afterwards. Following Day’s direction, they turn onto a dark country road. While discussing everything from James’s new job (and business attire) and Tyler’s break-up with a girl over a trip to a pumpkin patch, they soon realize they are on the wrong road.
Tyler tries to turn around but is stopped dead by a stand of trees on the road they had just driven over. When Tyler stops and he and James get out to try to figure things out, the group is attacked by a mob of people streaming out of the forest. They escape and drive away, even though Fisher has been badly scratched and bitten by the attackers.
The group is understandably freaked out. As they drive on, not daring to stop, they soon realize that the laws of physics do not seem to apply to their new situation. Although they’ve driven for hours, James notices they are not using gas. After a day and a night, the group notices they are neither hungry nor thirsty. Later, they realize they have no real sexual urges. Bodily functions seem to be suspended, although Fisher’s wounds do heal.
As the days and then months go on, the group starts trying to analyze their situation. They clock the amount of time between the attacks, venture into the woods, and even try to interrogate one of the people from the woods. James even lays down a marker to see whether or not they are in a loop, but the find nothing to help them escape the endless road they are caught on. They occasionally run across abandoned cars but cannot raise their owners.
Finally, the group starts structuring their days with scheduled dialogues, stops, word games, and even exercise sessions, transposing a social structure onto the monotony of their lives. Some of the dialogues are caustic. Others are funny and touching, but these activities do nothing to unlock the endless ribbon they travel.
It Ends is less of a horror film than it is an enigmatic psychological thriller. While there is terror and violence and suspense all throughout the film, the purpose of the story is not to shock or frighten, but to illustrate the pain of hopelessness and isolation and affirm the power of friendship.
The characters embody wildly varying aspects of human understanding and affinity. Near the beginning of the movie, Tyler tells the others that he broke up with a girl he liked because she wanted him to go with her to pick out a pumpkin and do “all that other fall shit”. When the others mock him for doing so, he shrugs it off. While he relates well to his friends, he obviously holds people at arm’s length.
James is analytical and rational. He is the one who logically tries to decipher their situation, coming up with the theory that they might have died in an accident and not know it and be in hell—or purgatory. He wonders aloud if they have triggered a curse, asking anyone if they drunk drove over a child and goes on to ask them to relate the worst thing they’ve done—a rude question posed without much empathy towards those being questions.
Day is smart and, as the journey goes on, grows closer to Fisher. It is the two of them who carve out a life inside the car. They decorate, redecorate, and attempt to make the best of things. In short, they have accepted their fate.
James, on the other hand, is constantly looking for a solution, a way out. He becomes more and more obsessive, getting to the point where Fisher and Day decide to do something about it.
It Ends is a haunting and mysterious film that places the viewer in the first-person point-of-view. We are in the car with this group of recent graduates as they try to figure out where they are going and why they can’t find a way off the endless, dreary, and deadly road they are caught on. As other critics have suggested, the parallels between this movie and John Paul Sartre’s play No Exit are obvious. In Sartre’s play, three condemned souls are forced to spend hell in a locked room with each other, but while Sartre’s play is explicitly set in the underworld, there is no affirmation that this is the case with the youngsters in It Ends. Perhaps their hell is each other.
It could be argued the film is an allegorical reference to the alienation, disappointment, and the emptiness of life for Generation Xers. Near the beginning of the film, Fisher poses a theoretical question of whether he’d like to hunt or be hunted by fifty hawks, one thousand rats, a man with a gun, or fifty gorillas. James—contrarily, as seems to be his nature—takes an absurd position and tries to logically defend it. Tyler asks why they’re still playing these stupid games, but later, when asked how he likes working HVAC, he says it’s only okay. It is the games, the personal interactions which make Fisher’s—and later Day’s—lives tolerable. Tyler’s arbitrary rejection of a girlfriend shows his unwillingness to make that interpersonal commitment.
It Ends is a fascinating excursion into a surreal world where logic takes on a shape that is coherent but ultimately inaccessible, but the core of the movie is not the supernatural conceit or the plot, but the group of friends who travel the road together. Unable to leave for fear of the unknown, they have only one lifeline, and that is the companionship of those caught in the same trap—the rideshare from hell.
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