Movie Review: It Ends (2025)
directed by Alex Ullom, starring Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon
Stop me if you heard this one. A group of folks go off into the woods and find themselves lost in an existential horror. There's no hobbits or Blair Witches though, just a Jeep Cherrokee and a bunch of screaming people running out of the trees. What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in acting and directing cause otherwise it would have been boring as shit.
What we have here is four people in a Jeep Cherokee driving down a road surrounded by Florida woods. They wait for a turn, but that shit ain't coming. What follows is an extended metaphor of your twenties: you and friends start with dumb conversations, some secrets, and hope to find yourself on a path that a few don't want to follow and then some pair off while you bond with the screaming monsters in the dark you find along the way. While having the same old conversations. And your goddamn car keeps going defying all logic because that shitbox should have died a couple hundred thousand miles ago.
Director Alex Ullom sticks the camera right in the cast's faces. I assume because the budget only allowed for one Jeep Cherokee, and there is not an infinite amount of space in those nutshells. The handheld camera is deftly used, sticking close to each character rather than drunkenly bouncing around like some found footage movies might do. Some shots come from strapping the camera to the side of the car and could come off as some bullshit experiment, but they work well with the isolation and slow panic of a claustrophobic landscape.
At times the characters came across as the annoying assholes that they are, but rather than be the general fodder like in teen slashers, the unlikeability comes from the characters being in their 20s. Look, I'm 45 years old. Hearing folks just out of college talk philosophy scream pretension and lack of experience that my friends and I also had at that age. It's hard to be that accurate and draw my curmudgeon heart to the characters through identity rather than action. Good on you to both the cast and the directing for making me empathize with characters I used to be without wanting them to be hurled out of the car by an alligator or a giant hockey masked lunatic.
Maybe I'm just reading into a dumb movie where some kids got lost, but I'd rather do that than dismiss my own thoughts.
That's all I got. For most of you, I'd say wait on this one. There's the young and old that will see different sides of this lost in the woods tale. Check it out, my navel gazing friends.
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