NEW YORK TIMES: It Ends turns post-graduation anxiety and low-budget road trip into Gen Z existential horror

Four friends in a car on a road to somewhere, or maybe nowhere: That’s the very simple concept behind It Ends, the feature debut of writer-director Alexander Ullom.

James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) have just graduated from college, and they’re getting a ride with Tyler (Mitchell Cole), whom they haven’t seen in a while. Where to doesn’t really matter: They’re just excited to get there.

For a while, this is an ordinary road trip, with James talking about his plans for a successful future and Tyler reluctantly explaining why his last relationship fell apart.

But when the four realise they must have missed a turn, they discover that the way they came is now, perplexingly, blocked by trees.

When a horde of screaming people runs out of the forest and tries to get into the car, they take off down the road in a panic back, sure they’ll find the turn. But as the days wear on — and the car does not run out of fuel — they start to wonder if they have stumbled into an alternate dimension, or worse.

Ullom is only in his late 20s, which puts him in a burgeoning category of young, internet- native filmmakers who make high-concept, sci-fi-inflected horror films. His unorthodox story includes financing that came from a viral YouTube sketch and a virtual reality poker game, and he cast some of his leads from Instagram.

Last year, It Ends premiered at Texas festival SXSW and was screened at the Sydney Film Festival in June; by December, it was available to rent for about a month on Letterboxd Video Store, a platform for unreleased independent films.

About a week in, Neon finally picked it up for theatrical release. This unusual story is getting to be familiar, with box-office smash hits from earlier this year, such as Backrooms, Iron Lung and Obsession, following similar templates.

In each case, the movie came to the big screen with a built-in viewership thanks to its creator’s slow-rolled audience building. It’s a distinctly 2026 way to make a movie, and it keeps working — not just because the movie’s path mimics that of trending video content, but because something about the stories these films are telling is tapping into their audience’s lives, too.

That audience is mostly Gen Z and millennials living in a world where the old rules don’t make sense and the path they were promised to the good life doesn’t work anymore. The result is some combination of malaise and terror, the feeling of being caught in a sludge that might turn into quicksand at any second.

With cinematographers Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones, Ullom creates a lot of visual interest out of very little — his characters are in a car on a two-way road flanked by trees and little else for the whole movie.

It’s a canny, effective use of what’s obviously a small budget, in the best way- the kind of tight filmmaking that leans brilliantly into its restrictions in both plot and aesthetics. Nothing feels wasted, and everything is purposeful.

It’s tempting to say that It Ends is a retelling of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play, No Exit, not least because there’s no, well, exit off this road. But that’s not really correct; this is something else. No Exit is about self-deception and the terror of being finally unmasked — the play’s most famous line, “Hell is other people”, refers to becoming aware of being the object of someone else’s gaze.

It Ends, on the other hand, is about something less individually horrifying, more systemically ghastly: finally taking the on-ramp to adulthood, only to discover that what you’ve worked for your whole life, until now, is unblinking, unchanging monotony.

The system of goals and rewards that governs youth, like grades and graduations, is gone. Now the best you can hope for is, say, a promotion, which brings more responsibility and work. Or a newer and bigger house, which comes with more expenses, which means working harder to earn the money to pay for it.

There are off-ramps to all of this, of course, and the older you become, the more you realise that you get to choose whether you want to be on that road at all.

But I suspect most people who followed the script up to college graduation experienced, at least for a while, that free-fall sensation that comes with realising nobody’s going to grade you or give you a summer break anymore.

From now on, this is it. What you see is what you get.

It Ends (MA15+) is out September 3