It Ends (2026)

Alexander Ullom's It Ends arrives with an $80,000 budget, a Jeep Cherokee, and the weight of an entire generation's post-collegiate despair loaded into the trunk. Four recent graduates drive into a highway that never ends. This is, we are told, a metaphor. The film is admirably restrained about stating this out loud, preferring instead to let the creeping dread do the heavy lifting, which is a directorial choice that should be commended and is, in this assessment, noted with the same quiet approval one reserves for a waiter who does not describe every ingredient in the soup.

The mental health dimension is where the film does its most earnest work. Characters carry their psychological freight with specificity: a disclosed suicide attempt here, a panic attack there, a studied interpersonal detachment that reads less as character flaw and more as generation-wide operating system. Ullom, who has been forthcoming in interviews about his own dissociative depression as the film's creative seed, is not exploiting these themes. He is processing them. The distinction matters. The result is a horror film that is genuinely interested in its characters' inner lives, which places it in a rather small and grateful subcategory of the genre.

The anti-capitalist undertow is real but mercifully underdeveloped as rhetoric. The infinite road-as-broken-social-contract is a legitimate piece of allegorical architecture, and Ullom has the good sense not to have anyone explain it. No character turns to another and says "this highway is late-stage capitalism," which is precisely the kind of creative discipline that separates a film from a think-piece. On the full spectrum of progressive cultural signaling, It Ends registers as a faint but sincere blip: a work of genuine personal anxiety that has absorbed its cultural moment without particularly trying to score points for doing so. It is, in the taxonomy of this column, a mild case. The patient is conscious and responsive.