It Ends (2025) Review – Poignant, Deep, and Enormously Mismarketed

Welcome to Knockout Horror. It’s day 6 of our 31 Days of Halloween 2026 feature and today we are breaking up the classics with something brand new as we check out Alexander Ullom’s It Ends (2025). There’s a lot to like about this movie but there is one huge problem… It is hideously mismarketed to a horror audience that is probably going to feel a bit duped. Let’s take a look.

An Interesting Release Schedule

So, this movie has a bit of a bizarre history that probably means that my review is coming way later than everyone else’s.

It Ends hit the festival circuit back in 2025 before joining Letterboxd Video Store as a rental for a very limited amount of time a few months later. It was then picked up by Neon and given a brief theatrical release at the end of August 2026.

That’s a very strange timeline; you don’t often see movies have a digital rental release nearly a year before they hit the cinema. There’s a simple explanation, though.

It Ends spent most of 2025 in distribution hell waiting to be picked up. Despite decent reviews from the festival run, nobody seemed all that interested in giving it a home. Letterboxd made the movie one of their first “Unreleased Gems” 30-day rentals in August and Neon then picked up the rights only a week later.

It actually seems as though Letterboxd fans helped get this one in the hands of distributors as the reception to the limited release was extremely warm. In a world where most festival darlings end up dumped straight on Shudder or Screambox, it’s quite a nice story.

The road trip from hell

The story follows friends James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson) as they head out on a late-night trip to buy food.

“This is a movie that, outside of one strong sequence early on, is far more concerned with matters of existential dread rather than actually trying to scare the viewer.”

After seemingly taking a wrong turn, the group find themselves driving on, what appears to be, an endless road that forces them to decide whether they should accept their fate or try to find a way out.

When I first read the synopsis for It Ends, my mind immediately went to the utterly fantastic Dead End. For those of you who don’t know, Dead End follows a very similar plot. A family on their way to a relative’s house for Christmas take a wrong turn and find themselves driving on an endlessly looping road.

Naturally, the two films, at least narratively, share a lot in common, but that’s where the similarities end. In fact, the two titles really couldn’t be more different. While Dead End is a movie replete with horror imagery, a ton of tension, and a lot of comedy, It Ends is the complete opposite.

This is a movie that, outside of one strong sequence early on, is far more concerned with matters of existential dread rather than actually trying to scare the viewer.

There’s no overt horror, there’s no jump scares, and there is very little in the way of tension. For the most part, it is 90 straight minutes of character dialogue as the friends talk about life while trapped in a car together. Outside of a genuinely terrifying concept, there is little here to please viewers looking for genre thrills.

Writer, director Alexander Ullom doesn’t want you to jump out of your seat. He wants to get in your head and pick away at your brain in an attempt to make you ask yourself all sorts of uncomfortable questions.

It’s like an indie emo horror movie

I’m a big fan of 90s indie emo. Now, don’t get it twisted, here, I’m not talking about bands like My Chemical Romance; I am talking about bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, Texas is the Reason, American Football, and Penfold.

Indie emo is dreamy, intimate, melancholy, and profoundly concerned with both how beautiful and how unpleasant life can be, all at the same time. It Ends is basically a film version of an indie emo song.

The entire movie is structured around drawn out conversations about life, love, relationships, death, and maintaining a desire to carry on against relentlessly bleak odds. It’s youth burnout made manifest.

The further the group travel, the more apparent it becomes that there is, seemingly, no escape from the road. This begs the question of why they should keep on going and how they can endure the hardship.

They engage in repetitive routines to help relieve stress and tension, make careful rules to keep driving time as smooth as possible, and they attempt to laugh through the trauma of being trapped in this liminal space.

If that sounds a little bit like the average experience of people just trying to get through everyday life in an increasingly bleak world, that’s because it is. It Ends is a poignant exploration into the crisis that is everyday existence.

“It Ends is basically a film version of an indie emo song.”

People trapped on this road endure the suffering until they can no longer find the motivation and then they give up. A cycle that has clearly been repeating for a long time, judging by the abandoned cars and desperate people littering the sides of the road.

This is a movie about the human condition told through the eyes of Gen Z. A generation that has earned every reason to be sceptical and cynical given the world they are inheriting. From that perspective, it is genuinely profound and incredibly deep.

But it won’t appeal to all horror fans

The big problem with It Ends isn’t what it does, but rather what it claims to be. It’s not a horror film, in the traditional sense. In fact, I would say out of all the movies I have reviewed on this website, it is probably the least worthy of a horror tag. That includes titles like I Saw The TV Glow and They Look Like People.

The themes are most definitely horrifying, the liminal nature of the road is seriously unsettling, and the concept is scary, but that’s about it. As a genre film, it simply won’t appeal to, potentially, most horror fans.

If you don’t buy into the core theme, you will likely check out pretty quickly and feel very mis-sold. There’s a hell of a lot of mundane chatter, as well. This is a movie that would have worked perfectly well as a twenty-minute short, but is stretched out to the point where the premise becomes almost transparent.

There are only so many times characters can go over the same topics before it starts to feel repetitive and padded. It’s something of a shame, too, because there’s so much that works incredibly well, here.

Alexander Ullom’s direction is incredibly self assured and the shot composition impressed me throughout. This is a beautiful movie and the way the team worked with space to keep the tight confines of the car from feeling repetitive was genuinely impressive.

There’s some brilliant shots here and there that would work tremendously well for horror scenes, too. There is always the suggestion that there is something hidden in the shadows somewhere, even when it turns out to not be the case.

Acting is very strong, too. Everyone does a fantastic job and the conversation feels genuinely natural. I should mention that the film suffers for the characters being somewhat unlikable, though. I really didn’t want to spend this amount of time with any of these people.

“If you don’t buy into the core theme, you will likely check out pretty quickly and feel very miss-sold.”

It Ends is a poignant and extremely deep film that I think is pretty poorly targeted at the horror community. It’s beautifully made, well acted, and genuinely unsettling at its core. It just doesn’t have enough to keep genre fans looking for scares entertained. A great watch for fans of movies like I Saw The TV Glow, though.

Our Scoring Philosophy: A Fair Fight

Horror is a genre that thrives thanks to indie film makers and low budget creators. At Knockout Horror, we firmly believe that every movie that we review deserves a fair fight. That's why we grade on a curve. Our star ratings are all about context, judging a film on what it achieves with the resources it has.

A 4-star rating for a scrappy indie horror made for $10,000 is a testament to its ingenuity and raw power. A 4-star rating for a $100 million blockbuster means it delivered on its epic promises. We don't compare them side-by-side; we celebrate success in every weight class, from the back-alley brawler to the heavyweight champion. Please keep this in mind when considering star ratings.