It Ends review – gripping micro-budget horror ranks among the year’s best — SkimNews
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- Alex Ullom's debut feature "It Ends" was produced on a $50,000 budget and is described in the review as ranking among the year's best horror films, drawing comparisons to high-concept cult classics
- The film's premise follows four twentysomethings whose late-night food run is rerouted by GPS deeper into a desolate forest, where they're set upon by eerie doppelgängers dressed like stranded strangers on an endless road
- Director Ullom says the film is rooted in his own struggle with dissociative depression, reframing the time loop from Sartrean hell into a meditation on endurance and connection
- The ensemble cast — Mitchell Cole as Tyler, Akira Jackson as Day, Noah Toth as Fisher, and Phinehas Yoon as James — anchors naturalistic birthday and road-trip-game scenes inside a hatchback that becomes a "chamber piece on wheels"
- Release schedule: US on 21 August, Australia on 3 September, with a UK date to follow
Why it matters: A debut feature made for $50,000 earning comparisons to cult horror classics signals the continued viability of micro-budget genre filmmaking, and Alex Ullom's explicit grounding of the time loop in his own dissociative depression positions the film as a mental-health artifact rather than pure genre exercise when it hits US theaters 21 August.
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