The Road to Nowhere
· The Atlantic
If there’s one thing young moviegoers seem to fear these days, it’s the idea of the in-between. The term liminal horror has gone from niche internet speak to Hollywood trend, thanks to the acclaimed TV show Severance and the recent smash-hit movie Backrooms. Stories like these mine the unsettling feeling of nondescript office corridors and basement halls that seem to self-replicate into infinity; this spring also saw the U.S. release of the excellent Japanese film Exit 8, a video-game adaptation about someone getting trapped in a subway station with seemingly no way out. Now there’s It Ends, a low-budget bit of creepy cleverness with a punchy pitch: What if you got lost driving down a road that never ends?
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That this type of premise has grown more commonplace makes sense. Such a film typically needs only one set (for example, a long, lonely road, flanked by trees), a small cast of characters, and a spare, intentionally circular script. It Ends uses that scrappy charm to its advantage, the lack of frills dialing up a sense of realism. The film, written and directed by the newcomer Alexander Ullom, follows James (played by Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), four friends who are headed on a celebratory graduation road trip. Their drive is occupied by the sort of nonsensical, wandering conversations young people love to have; there’s no real sign of anything being wrong until Tyler notices that he’s missed his turn.
The horror builds gradually, spikes, then slows to an existentially brutal crawl. The group realizes that there’s no way off the road, but when they get out of the car to look around, swarms of people emerge from the woods and fight to enter their vehicle. As the friends continue on in search of safety, they notice that the gas tank never goes empty, they never feel hungry, and nobody needs to sleep. They’re in a sort of limbo, condemned to keep moving despite having no destination. It’s essentially a Gen Z take on Sartre’s No Exit, a gentle riff on hell being other people, with a few jump scares tossed in for fun.
[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]
But while prior small-scale horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had an unseen villain guiding the scares, It Ends thrives on an utter lack of information about what is happening and why. The terror of liminality is how effortlessly it evokes the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off. There’s no monster around the corner, no demonic puzzle to be solved. The characters of It Ends initially debate what’s going on, keeping track of patterns occurring around them in search of some explanation. While James keeps doing so as a way of staying sane, the others start to accept their frozen existence; the strangers in the woods, it seems, are also confined to the road’s environs.
That Ullom manages to squeeze a feature-length movie out of such a mundane premise is impressive; it helps that his cast is charming enough to carry it off. As the film plods on, it starts to skip further and further ahead in time, warping the viewer’s sense of chronology. It Ends is more aggressively aimless than other recent entries in the genre: Exit 8 sees its heroes try to figure a way out of their infinite subway station (it was based on a video game, so some resolution is built into the plot); the protagonists of Backrooms discovered a world of non-Euclidean corridors and lobbies in a basement, then found out that opportunistic corporate villains were plundering it; such a revelation hints at sequels that could expand its lore.
The simplicity of It Ends, by comparison, is wonderful and jarring, as is the total inability for future properties to spill out of it. Part of the dread that liminal horror mines is the drudgery of the never-ending scroll, a familiar feeling for anyone who’s been on social media; no matter how much you look, you’ll never hit bottom, only summon more of whatever the algorithm wants to serve you. It Ends is set entirely outdoors but captures that same fear of being stuck without any touchstones to distinguish simulation from reality.