It Ends Review: SXSW Winner Finds a Home, But Not a Destination

A group of friends trapped on an endless road confront fear, identity, and the terror of never arriving.

Review: It Ends (2025)

There’s something strangely poetic about It Ends being the final film I review for 2025. Not because it neatly sums up the year in horror or indie cinema—but because it mirrors the feeling of reaching the end of a long road, unsure whether the journey actually took you where you hoped it would.

First on my radar back at SXSW earlier this year, It Ends arrived with serious pedigree. A Grand Jury Award win at SXSW, followed by another at the Florida Film Festival, usually signals a film destined to make the rounds, get scooped up, and live loudly in the cultural conversation. Instead, It Ends quietly drifted into limbo—rescued, thankfully, by Letterboxd’s rental platform, which continues to function as a lifeline for films the larger streaming ecosystem inexplicably leaves behind.

Directed by Alex Ullom, It Ends centers on a group of college-age friends—Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), Day (Akira Jackson), and James (Phinehas Yoon)—whose casual car ride becomes something far more existential. Confined to a Jeep that never runs out of gas, never requires rest, and never lets them arrive anywhere meaningful, the group finds themselves trapped in a purgatorial loop. Every time they stop, something terrifying occurs. The only option is to keep driving.

At first, the concept is gripping. The mystery is clean, the rules are unsettling, and the early tension hums with dread. Ullom understands how to weaponize stillness and repetition, using the endless road as a mirror for the emotional crossroads his characters are facing. Graduation looms. Adulthood waits. Friendships are beginning to crack under the weight of unspoken truths. The supernatural conceit works best as a metaphor—this isn’t about where they’re going, it’s about who they are when forced to sit with themselves.

The cast is uniformly strong. These performances feel natural, lived-in, and emotionally honest. You believe these people are friends. You believe their resentments, their fears, their half-formed dreams. Psychologically, It Ends is doing real work—and that’s where the film shines brightest.

Unfortunately, what starts as its greatest strength slowly becomes its undoing.

As the runtime stretches on, the film begins to lose momentum. The mystery remains compelling, but it doesn’t deepen in a way that sustains the tension. For a genre increasingly populated by “endless road,” “time loop,” and “reality trap” narratives—Brightwood being a particularly strong recent comparison—It Ends struggles to evolve beyond its initial premise. The questions linger, but the escalation doesn’t arrive.

And in a media landscape with shrinking attention spans, this hurts the film more than it should. Despite being centered on young characters, It Ends ironically feels more likely to lose younger viewers as it drifts into introspection without offering enough narrative propulsion in return.

That doesn’t make it a failure—just an unfulfilled promise.

The ending, in particular, lacks the emotional or conceptual payoff needed to justify the slow burn. Mystery without satisfaction can work, but here it feels less deliberate and more incomplete. You don’t leave haunted—you leave wishing the film had pushed just a little harder.

There’s still a lot to admire. It Ends is thoughtful, well-acted, and thematically coherent. It’s a film about transition, identity, and the terror of stagnation—and in that sense, it knows exactly what it wants to say. It just doesn’t quite know how to finish saying it.

Still, it’s worth seeing. And it’s worth being grateful that Letterboxd gave it a home.

HMU Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Not a letdown—but not the destination we hoped for. As we close out 2025, It Ends feels less like a conclusion and more like a pause before what comes next.