The road taken goes awry in repetitive but thoughtful debut
“I took the road less traveled by,” poet Robert Frost famously wrote, “And that has made all the difference.” While most people interpret the speaker’s choice here as a positive decision, the text is actually ambiguous. We’d like to think the choice made has bettered the speaker’s life, but we don’t know for certain. After watching the new thriller It Ends, you may come away with a whole new perspective on Frost’s poem and the plusses and minuses of taking an unknown back road. Writer/director Alexander Ullom’s debut feature, which earned the then 27-year-old a Grand Jury Award nomination at last year’s SXSW, is less of a traditional jump-scare horror picture and more of an extended metaphor about existential dread. As such, it can be both mildly intriguing and also frustratingly repetitive.
It Ends follows four high school friends and recent college grads, Day (Akira Jackson), James (Phinehas Yoo), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole), as they head out for an evening drive. We don’t know where they’re going, but they’re using a map app that tells them to make a turn on a straight, wooded road. They chat and joke and swap stories about what they’ve been up to and what their future plans are, until Tyler begins to realize they’ve been driving too long without making a second, anticipated turn. When turning around only leads them to a dead end, reversing course puts them back on the long, straight road, with no intersecting streets to be found. For the sake of moving the plot along, Ullom’s script has the friends deduce and accept fairly quickly that they are trapped on an infinite road, with no apparent escape.
Making matters worse, at various points, strangers rush out of the surrounding woods, screaming and asking for help. The quartet soon realizes they can only stop the car for 90 seconds at most before they are swarmed, adding another layer of stress to the already horrifying situation.
What Ullom presents us with, then, as the friends debate why they’re in this situation and what to do about it, is not so much a plot-driven thriller, but a meditation on the nature of existence and how we can choose to accept our fate or fight against it. Is there, as Estragon states in Samuel Beckett’s existential drama Waiting for Godot “nothing to be done” about the predicament but live with it, and make the most of it? Should we believe that the friends can not merely accept their destiny, but actually embrace it, as Albert Camus suggests is possible in his famous essay about Sisyphus, whom “one must imagine [as]… happy”?
Some of the friends will say yes, and others will say no, and that divide propels the film’s limited narrative. If you find these questions thought-provoking, this movie is for you. If you’re seeking a bit more action and less metaphorical philosophy, however, you may want to skip this one.
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It Ends is currently playing, including at the AMC Kabuki and Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco, the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville, and the Landmark Piedmont in Oakland.
