Ullom tells the story of four characters stuck on a road that never ends. They drive and drive, but can never find an exit from this road to nowhere.
If they leave the car, they're quickly surrounded by hordes of people who seem intent on harming them, but whose motives aren't made clear. Eventually, the travelers determine that they can exit the car for about 90 seconds before an attack begins. That allows them (and the movie) to stretch a bit.
Then, as the Willie Nelson song goes, it's on the road again. No longer a symbol of mobility and freedom, the car becomes a cage.
Ullom relies on his actors -- Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchel Cole, and Phineas Yoon -- to create characters who understandably are baffled by their situation. None of them knows why they've been assigned to a perpetual limbo in a car that never runs out of gas, always passing through the same wooded area.
By refusing to dot every “i’ or cross every “t,” Ullom encourages us to wring some meaning from the ambiguous absurdity of the situation the movie depicts.
Still, there's only so far Ullom can get with a movie that measures itself in miles, at one point showing us that these travelers have covered 186,000 miles. At another point, they discover an abandoned car with an odometer that's approaching one million miles. Others apparently have shared this horrific fate.
Some see the movie as an expression of Gen Z frustration among recent college grads who are poised to enter a society that has rendered them pointless.
As an exercise in low-budget, indie creativity, It Ends earns a high score, but the movie continues to the point where we, like the characters, begin to feel beaten down. That takes some of the edge off what has been a canny little slice of contemporary horror, a foray into a world in which no option seems to make much sense.
Happy travels.
