It Ends review – gripping micro-budget horror ranks among the year’s best
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- Alex Ullom made his feature directorial debut with 'It Ends,' a horror film produced for just $50,000
- 'It Ends' follows four twentysomethings whose GPS leads them into a forest, where they're set upon by doppelgängers and trapped in an endlessly repeating drive with no hunger, fatigue, or physical needs
- Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon star as the central quartet, whose naturalistic chemistry turns the hatchback into a 'chamber piece on wheels'
- Ullom said the film is rooted in his own struggle with dissociative depression and reframes Sartre's 'hell is other people' as a possible source of salvation
- 'It Ends' will be released in the US on 21 August and in Australia on 3 September, with a UK release to follow
Why it matters: Made for roughly the cost of a used car, 'It Ends' lands on US screens on August 21 as a rare micro-budget theatrical horror that critics compare to cult high-concept classics, signaling that genre prestige no longer requires a studio-sized check — Ullom frames the entire project as an exercise in making life with dissociative depression survivable.
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