It Ends is a 2025 Existential Horror Comedy road movie directed, written, and edited by Alexander Ullom in his feature debut. The film stars Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole, Jon Linstad, Jenny Doyle, and Ian Weir.
Four recent college graduates embark on a late night road trip, but their plans detail when they take a wrong turn onto a seemingly infinite backroad. Confined to a perpetually running Jeep and surrounded by a forest filled with horrors beyond human comprehension, the friends try to grasp the meaning (or meaninglessness) of their endless drive… and if there's truly no way out.
The film is distributed by Neon and the Letterboxd Video Store. Production companies include Growing Up Dead Films, Snoot Entertainment, Above .330, Aymara Films, Please Hold Pictures, and Oddfellows Pictures. It premiered in South by Southwest on March 7th, 2025, and would be available to rent through the Letterboxd Video Store on December 10th that same year. Theatrically, it's scheduled to be released in American theaters on August 21st, 2026.
Previews: Official Trailer
It Ends contains examples of:
- Advertising by Association: The trailer and poster advertise the film as coming from "the producer of Backrooms".
- Insult Backfire: In the trailer, Fisher posits that the woods surrounding the forest are filled with people that James has been a dick to. James counters that maybe it's full of people he's given dick to, and the others retort that no one would be there if that was the case.
- Ontological Mystery: The question of how the students came to be trapped on the road and whether they can leave hangs over the film, though the trailer shows that not all characters are interested in finding an answer:Day: James, there is no test!
James: So it's just this?! FOREVER?! - Shout-Out:
- In the trailer, James suggests that all the characters died in a car crash and are doomed to forever drive the road because it was what they were already doing when they died, much like Dead End (2003). Another character immediately shoots it down.
- In the trailer, Day laments that she was "this close" to downloading Subway Surfers prior to becoming trapped on the road.
- Unnaturally Looping Location: The trailer shows that the students are stuck on a seemingly endless backroad with no real goal except to keep driving onward, with only the suggestion of other people briefly seen when a group of people swarms the car near the end of the trailer and a man in the forest calls out for help during the trailer's stinger.