'It Ends' review: Gen Z's disillusionment is distilled in a mind-snapping road trip thriller

It should have been a simple road trip, the kind where you ask each other silly hypothetical questions, eat junk food, and make memories that get foggy yet more glorious in the recounting. But It Ends, the directorial debut of writer/helmer/editor Alexander Ullom, takes this setup down a merciless road, where such joys are hard to come by.

The premise seems deceptively simple: Four childhood friends on a road trip find themselves on an endless road, where there's no chance to turn off. And every time they stop, they are rushed by strangers, who race screaming out of the surrounding woods. In such a scenario, what path is left for the group except forward? And what does that look like?

Well, for starters: grim.

It Ends offers a reflection on Gen Z's existential dread.

College has just concluded, and thus it's time for James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) to move out of their dorms and onto the next chapter in their lives. Who better to transport them than their childhood buddy Tyler (Mitchell Cole)? While they were off getting a degree, he was learning how to be a grown-up without one.

In the front seat, Tyler keeps his eyes on the road, while his friends bounce about a familiar internet hypothetical. 50 hawks, 5 gorillas, one gun-toting man, 10,000 mice. Choose two groups to defend you against the other two.

While aspiring graphic designer Day and chipper Fisher argue playfully, James, who has his white-collar life mapped out from shitty first apartment to six-figure salary and happy nuclear family, is dryly judgmental of their logic and the question itself. On its surface, it's a petty disagreement. But it's one that becomes reflective of the four's dynamic as a whole. Tyler is a doer. Fisher and Day, dreamers, who revel in emotion and play over logic. And James is ruthlessly logical.

So, it's Tyler who first recognizes that despite their GPS, they're lost. The promised turn in the road hasn't come, and when he turns around, all he finds is a dead-end at a forest thick with screaming strangers. What choice do they have but to take a U-turn and drive the other way?

Ullom builds elements eerily surreal, not in his visuals but in the details of this road's realm. The foursome realizes that the car's gas supply is constant, never dropping below a quarter of a tank. They are similarly stagnant. They no longer experience hunger or thirst. And no matter how much they crave the reprieve of sleep, it will not come.

There is no rest for the youth, stuck in a world they did not make and cannot understand. But that won't stop James from trying. With every passing mile, he seeks tirelessly for new information that might lead to an answer, if not a way out. His friends however, begin to wonder what the point of answers would be if there is no way out. And just like that, Ullom makes his road trip movie a bleak reckoning of what it means to be young on a planet that's being destroyed by those who came before.

It Ends succeeds because of a solid young cast.

Jackson and Toth create a comedy duo of daffy besties, who look to find a laugh even in the darkest moments. Together, they keep It Ends from being suffocatingly bleak. Cole, for his part, grounds the film's reality with an authentic world-weariness. But Yoon is tasked with carrying the film on his shoulders as its restrained core.

Where his friends will scream, cry, whine, and threaten to give up, James is resolute. And Yoon must make this dedication believable, even in the face of so much that is incomprehensible. His dark eyes flicker with defiance as he sees miles of the same stretch of road and forest. And even as his friends add levity or energy, it is he that we are bound to, challenged to recognize where our breaking point might be.

At just 87 minutes, It Ends is a "short-ass movie," but doesn't feel like a sprint. It's a moody trek, on which Ullom expresses existential dread through the deterioration of that most sacred of movie cows: childhood friendship. What if, It Ends asks, the people you depend on the most can't save you from the future? What if the control we imagined we had as kids to choose our vocation and so our destiny were a total fiction? What if the title is a lie, and there is no end? What if the meaning of our lives is not one we can answer, no matter how long the road?

It Ends will silently pose the questions through James and his friends' harrowing journey. But its up to each audience member to find the meaning themselves.

It Ends opens in theaters on Aug. 21.

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