Life is a highway, and writer-director Alexander Ullom’s It Ends – finally making its way to theaters nationwide this weekend – may be the most existential representation of the endless road of life in cinemas today. 2026 has been a banner year for horror that appeals to Gen Z from young directors, and while the film may initially seem targeted to the demographic because of the makeup of its cast, Ullom taps into fears felt by anyone who feels trapped by life’s mundanities. But those walking into the theater hoping to be as frightened as they were with films like Backrooms or Obsession will find themselves disappointed by the film’s bloodlessness.

The simplicity of It Ends is both its greatest strength and its biggest detriment. It doesn’t take too long before the plot kicks into gear, and we only spend time with a limited number of characters. Our four young adult heroes are longtime friends who’ve ventured on separate paths after high school but come together one more time to help one of them move. There’s James (Phinehas Yoon), the one member of the group who seems to have his life together, with a full-time corporate job and everything. There’s Day (Akira Jackson), an aspiring graphic designer. There’s Tyler (Mitchell Cole), who may or may not have dropped out of the army and now works as an HVAC tech. And there’s Fisher (Noah Toth), who gets the short end of the stick in the characterization department by simply being a generic white guy. Late in the night, they all pile into Tyler’s outdated Jeep, but they soon notice that the country road they venture onto doesn’t seem to end, nor can they find the turn they were supposed to make.

Even more frightening is when they stop to check their surroundings, they’re suddenly mobbed by a screaming horde of people who appear out of the woods, attacking them and their car. Through a series of trials, they come to learn that, once they stop the car, they have about 90 seconds before another random gang of raging zombie-like people comes for them. And so It Ends drives on, as the gang finds ways to cope with their new predicament. Ullom writes his way out of certain pathological needs by essentially giving their car eternal life and an endless supply of gas, and their phones never run out of battery; the characters also, conveniently, don’t feel the need to eat or drink, nor do they feel any sexual urges.

It doesn’t take a Harvard business school grad to understand the central metaphor of It Ends as a metaphor for young adults and their fears of the mind-numbing routines of the grown-up world. Thankfully Ullom has a firm grasp on each of the characters and how they react to their situation. James is the only one whose natural instinct is to figure out a way to “solve” it, believing that they’re in some kind of purgatory, possibly because of some misdeeds in the before times. The rest of the group mostly settles into a new normal, setting aside designated times of the day to do things like air grievances, tell stories, play music, or simply scream into the void. This is all well and good, but the film never really ratchets up the tension or introduces a new variable that threatens their survival. Eventually, the screaming horde even becomes something for the characters to mock, safe in the comfort that they can simply drive away.

Yes, many genre films have been derailed by trying to over-explain the wacky situation. But It Ends isn’t interested in these narrative threads, thankfully, instead focusing on the existential threat to what a potentially literal life on the road would do to a person’s psyche. Ullom employs a strange narrative device about halfway through the film, adding a title card with one of the characters’ names and the number of miles driven so far. This trick doesn’t add much to the proceedings besides quantifying the time lost to these characters’ driving, but I’ll chalk it up to Ullom’s lack of experience. Much more effective is when one character remarks that they can no longer remember what brought them onto the road in the first place.

Strangely, It Ends has had its own bizarre, winding road towards theatrical distribution. After initially premiering at the South by Southwest festival in March of 2025 and playing at subsequent regional festivals, the film found new life on VOD in December, where it gathered enough buzz to catch the attention of Neon. Only time will tell if Ullom’s directorial debut will garner enough buzz or box office bucks to stand next to the headline-generating success of the aforementioned horror films that dominated earlier this year, but It Ends shows he can effectively stage a metaphorical, character-focused genre film with limited means. The road is wide open for wherever he goes next.

It Ends is now in theaters nationwide.

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