“This shouldn’t have happened,” Alexander Ullom said moments before the premiere of his feature debut “It Ends.” The writer/director was surely referring to putting together a spartan budget that he later mentioned involved “a magician with a lot of money” and “sketches for a real estate mogul” as he set up shop in high income neighborhoods to pitch his film to passerbys, but any time something as original and well-crafted as this comes down the pike, it can’t help but feel that the impossible has occurred.
In the spirit of films such as “Primer” and “The Sound of My Voice,” “It Ends” has a far bigger idea than its budget would seem to allow for, but the execution never lets that thought pass through your head as it unfolds. Following four college-aged friends that have piled into a Jeep Cherokee en route to an unknown destination, the less said about where they seem to end up is for the best, but consider yourself warned that there will be spoilers ahead. There’s only so much that’s revealed about Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) upfront, who can be initially overheard in a conversation that takes all sorts of wild directions when Tyler hasn’t seen his friends in a while and James is on the verge of moving away to start a new life. However, in between talk of what species would be best suited to help during a game of outdoor survival, it seems as if Tyler has missed the fork in the road where he was supposed to turn, quickly revealing a psychological one for the gang when it doesn’t seem like he’s gone in the wrong direction at all. Fear sets in when there’s a wall of trees where Tyler could’ve sworn he made his entrance into the forest and it looks like they’ve reached a point of no return.
“It Ends” actually opens with an upward shot of the sky as if you’re looking up from buried six feet under and when lots of other small talk is exhausted, speculation has to turn to whether the quartet has reached the afterlife. Ullom never wavers from the naturalistic tone of the conversations that sound as if you’re amongst friends, but there’s increasing evidence these friends are certainly not on this earth anymore when their gas tank seems endless and no one’s hungry many hours after they’ve been on the road. They also have to consider that rather than heaven, they’ve reached hell and as they scramble to think of any sin they might’ve committed, they agree they’re in purgatory as the days wear on with no exit and they start having to keep their time outside the car to a minimum as the many other empty vehicles on the side of the road suggest they have something to fear.
At least a few scenes make a convincing case that Ullom will be considered for every major studio horror film for the next few years with their visceral panache as the group is visited with intense bursts of violence, exceptionally well-staged to put audiences right inside the Jeep with Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones’ muscular cinematography. However, what’s truly unsettling occurs when everyone in the car begins to lose hope of a return on their own timeline, at odds with one another about a way forward, but also how they look at life in general. Games they play to keep themselves occupied reveal different attitudes that set up the eventual life-or-death decisions they have to make and when a certain delirium sets in where the group can only operate in hypotheticals, it’s alternately fascinating and frightening to see where their minds go.
When the action in the car and the thoughts rattling around in the heads of the characters are equally dynamic, the film is remarkably gripping and has the tantalizing aftertaste of wondering what it all means well after Tyler, James, Day and Fisher confront the same question. Recognizing that to be alone with one’s thoughts can be the most dangerous place to be, “It Ends” can be terrifying, but also exhilarating when it’s conveyed so vividly as Ullom does.
“It Ends” will screen again at SXSW on March 11th at noon at Alamo 3 and 4 and March 14th at Alamo Lamar 9 at 9:15 pm.