The microbudget indie horror It Ends has been simmering on the theatrical distribution backburner since at least as far back as spring of 2025, when it locally premiered at the Overlook Film Festival. By the time Neon picked it up, it had already seen a brief streaming run on the Letterboxd “Video Store” platform as an undistributed work that had fallen through the cracks of the festival circuit and been left for dead on the side of the proverbial road. A lot can change in a year, though, and the current horror cinema landscape is a lot more hospitable to It Ends now than it might have been in 2025, before Backrooms brought liminal-space horror to national headlines and Obsession became a surprise mega-hit for Zoomers who delighted in finally seeing their own generational neuroses projected on the big screen. It’s much easier to see a clear path for It Ends‘s marketability now that we live in a post-Backrooms, post-Obsession world, even if its payoffs are much quieter than those potential comps’. It may be set in a supernaturally liminal space like the backrooms, but it’s only interested in functioning as a horror film in its cold-open segment, all wrapped up before the opening credits. Likewise, its interpersonal Gen-Z drama refuses to escalate to flashy, cathartic extremes, sticking much closer to the depressive mood of Leviticus than the violent hysteria of Obsession. If the current moment of youthful indie breakouts only applies to the horror genre, then It Ends just barely falls inside the outer boundary of benefiting. It offers a version of liminal-space horror where the liminal space is adolescence and the hell is other people.

Four childhood friends take a post-college road trip into the unknown, each struggling to come up with a plan for what to do with their lives now that they’re technically adults. Once outside the city, they find themselves on a mysterious woodland highway that has no turns and no end, existing in an alternate reality where cars never run out of gas and bellies never get hungry and no one is ever horny and every hour is the same and nothing ever changes. When they step outside the Jeep to investigate their new tree-lined prison, they are swarmed by a screaming mob of strangers who auto-populate in the wilderness, chasing them back onto the infinite road. This nightmare scenario is initially played like a high-concept horror film, complete with periodic jump scares and Cube-like ponderings about possible ways to escape the limbo of the highway. Eventually, though, the adrenaline wears off and the monotonous nature of the road trip leaves the Jeep-bound teens more bored than scared. They essentially take turns giving up, finding little satisfaction in the search for meaning or camaraderie or escape in their supernatural predicament. Even the zombie-like strangers lurking in the woods gradually lose interest in the game, collectively going comatose instead of going berserk. The horror of the back half, if there is any, is all philosophical instead of physical. The teens individually become just as indifferent to their survival as the highway is, each choosing their own personal moment to leave the Jeep forever and join the soulless, dead-eyed adults in the woods. Then, as the title promises, it ends.

There’s clearly some broad metaphor about the human condition at play here but, to the movie’s credit, it’s difficult to define. The never-ending highway certainly gets one thing right about life: it’s boring as fuck, with each day’s monotonous routine blurring into the next. When this Jeep full of freaked-out teens pull onto that highway, they have vague but grand ambitions about what they’re going to do with their newfound adulthood, so it’s depressing to watch them slowly resign themselves to the repetitive nothingness of an adult reality. The thesis, if you’re going to put it into words, appears to be that growing up is giving up, but what else are you going to do? Life is a highway, and even after you ride it all night long there’s nowhere else to go; there’s just more highway. The meaning behind individual details of the characters’ world within the Jeep and even the Jeep itself can mean different things to different audiences, though, which is where the movie finds its stickiest philosophical talking points. Personally, I found myself thinking of the Jeep as a metaphor for the way I treat this very movie review website: a stubbornly childish project that I’ll continue to drive into the infinite void until all my friends who came along on the drive gradually lose interest one by one, leaving me alone at the wheel of my juvenile journey to nowhere. Your own self-identification may vary. Maybe your Jeep is a weekends-only cover band or a college clique or an actual vintage Jeep you plan to get running one day — whatever project is stubbornly carrying over your youthful ambition and idealism into the soul-numbing monotony of adulthood. Or maybe it’ll represent something else to you entirely. Whatever the case, the monster that’s loose in this particular horror story is of the personal & philosophical variety, nothing like the manic pixie nightmare girlfriend of Obsession nor the memetic mutants of Backrooms. In the current Gen-Z horror moment, It Ends offers an opportunity to quietly sit & reflect in the dark, which is not an especially sexy marketing pitch for a low-budget, high-concept teen horror flick (and might explain its so-far muted reception).

-Brandon Ledet