It Ends

Have you ever been on a road trip that feels like it goes on forever and things started getting a bit existential? That’s the whole deal with the chewy new film It Ends. The horror-meets-psychological thriller follows four friends who just graduated college, as they turn onto a road through a dense forest and the road just keeps going. Directed by Alexander Ullom, It Ends is both chill and chilling, and a lot of fun to talk about. Chasing down your next horror fix? Check out these episodes: 'Backrooms' brings YouTube horror to the big screen https://www.npr.org/2026/06/01/nx-s1-5838026/backrooms-brings-youtube-horror-to-the-big-screen In ‘Weapons’, the kids aren't at all right, not in the slightest, nope https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5496241/in-weapons-the-kids-arent-at-all-right-not-in-the-slightest-nope Should you give 'Presence' the ghost of a chance? https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/1227458702/should-you-give-presence-the-ghost-of-a-chance Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:47Speaker 02

  Guys, they just set out to go get food.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  They set out to go get food, and what did they do to end up on the endless road?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Ever been on a road trip that feels like it goes on forever? Did things start feeling a little existential? Because that is the whole deal with the chewy new horror film, It Ends. That is a lot of fun to talk about. Four recent college graduates turn onto a road through a dense forest, and the road just keeps going.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Right. Their car never runs out of gas. They don't get hungry or thirsty. And whenever they stop to stretch their legs, they find they have to get back into the car and just keep going. Are they dead? Is it aliens? Or have they stumbled upon a great big old honkin metaphor? I'm Aisha Harris.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  And I'm Glen Weldon, and joining us on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Jordan Cruciola. She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Seen on Maximum Fun. Hey, Jordan.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Hello. Thank you so much for having me back again, guys.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Of course. All right, let's get to it. It Ends is, uh, help me out with this. It's a psychological thriller, horror?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think-

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Character study?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, character study. Uh, engine for existential dread is a genre, but it could be.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It is also a debut feature, written and directed and edited by Alexander Ulam, and it is a doozy. The movie features four friends from high school who have just graduated college. There is the cold analytical James, played by Phineas Yoon. There is the nerdy jokester Fisher, played by Noah Toth. The charismatic, emotionally centered Day, played by Akira Jackson. And the distant ex-military guy Tyler, played by Mitchell Cole. Each of them responds to their worsening situation in very different ways, which is kind of the whole point. It Ends is in theaters now. Jordan, let's kick it off with you. Now, I knew that the film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma was gonna be your jam. I'm less sure about this. Talk to me about it.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you'd just broken this down to me in its parts, and even look with the tone and pacing and all, I wouldn't have been 100% sure that this was my jam either. But I ended up really getting into it. I fell into its groove. I, after an intro that genuinely scared me a lot and left me worried that I was gonna sit kind of having nightmares all afterwards, this is a character study piece. If you're coming in, I don't think it's a spoiler sending. It's a, it's a fair contextualizing. If you're expecting a high quotient of conventional or straightforward horror, this isn't that movie. But I think you should stick around because I think it is well worth the literal and figurative journey that we're going on with these characters.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Right. Okay, what about you, Ayesha?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, within the first 10, 15 minutes of this movie, it suggests that it might be that kind of horror movie. But, but then it kind of dissipates and then turns into more of a moody, moody, moody, very moody mood piece. I also think this is the type of movie that is inevitably gonna get comparisons. I've already seen comparisons to Backrooms. And I can see that because of this whole idea of like liminal space and just driving and driving and driving. If you were in the backrooms of the woods. Yes, exactly. Backrooms, but woods. But I would say I liked this a lot more than Backrooms. I think as a cinematic visual piece, it's not quite as arresting as Backrooms is, and the production design, but that's kind of, I think, by design because it's

• 4:13Speaker 02

  the woods versus, you know, being able to stack up lots of various weird cultural artifacts into rooms. Like, it's not supposed to be the same thing. As opposed to Backrooms, I think this is much more intellectually and emotionally probing, even if it doesn't necessarily reveal all that much about why exactly this is happening. Like, it's very ambiguous in a lot of ways, and I think some people might find that dissatisfying. But I really latched on to this. I really latched on to like what I might do in this situation and trying to map it onto each character. And I think as we learn more about these relationships between these characters, like, the first few minutes, I felt like the conversation felt like, I feel like I'm watching a movie where kids, quote unquote, young people are speaking. I don't know about this dialogue.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know what you're saying.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  But then, once we got into the situation that they are in, and we learn more about them, I think we learned just enough about how each of them are, their character habits. And it moves beyond just like tics and obvious ways that we might think a young person might talk, and into something a little bit deeper. And I think the performances helped that. So overall, I was very pro It Ends, and I just found it something fun to ponder and also really depressing to ponder as well. Yeah, I'll go with that.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I think that's a sweet spot. I think that's what it's aiming for, yeah. I also thought this was, uh, great. I thought it was really smart. I thought it was well-written and well-acted. We have to talk more about these performances because so much of this movie is on the shoulders of these actors. I also thought, in terms of the writing, it was remarkably restrained. I really liked that. I mean, it is very smart about the human tendency to impute everything, meaning, onto places where no meaning exists, and to find patterns, and actually to create patterns out of pure nothingness, and invest that with meaning that we create, and then to take it even further and to assume in a very narcissistic way that whenever a bad thing happens, that is the universe, that

• 6:10Speaker 01

  is God, or whatever. That is taking a personal interest in you and wanting to punish you or to teach you. To center yourself in that extreme way is a very, very human thing. It's also incredibly arrogant, and it's very young, too, in a way, which is also, this is where it kind of overlaps with horror movie stuff. Jordan, we've talked about this many times. One of the reasons I've historically shied away from certain kinds of horror, slasher horror in particular, is because there's always this moralistic, not always, there's often a moralistic component of normativeness and, you know, when kids have sex, they get punished. That's a component of a lot of horror, especially early slasher films. Someone transgresses, they get punished. So when these kids start assuming that they're getting punished, they're a lot like the horror film characters they are. The difference is,

• 6:54Speaker 01

  instead of just letting it happen to them, they really try to start figuring stuff out. That's my favorite thing about this movie, is that they hypothesize, and then they test that hypothesis. They also do things like they establish routines because they know that we need routines. They waste time on memes even though there's just four of them in that car. And in this dialogue you mentioned, Ayesha, which is there for a reason. This is the kind of banal, meaningless, extremely online conversations that exist only to get people engaging with each other. And that's what the movie's about. At the end of the day, it's, life is about passing the damn time with other people. So, you know, it ends up being kind of like no exit, or, you know, no exits and no off-ramps and no

• 7:38Speaker 01

  rest stops. If Sart was maybe 23% cheered up, or at least had accepted a lot in life, there's a negotiation that these characters make with this situation that is what the film's all about, then I really like that.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I found myself wondering, I think these are people who are supposed to be just out of college, or like around college age, so- Yeah, they're, they're packing up and moving out of college. A friend has come to get them, and they just set out to go get food. Yeah. They set out to go get food, and what did they do to end up on the endless road? Who knows? But like, the fact that they're that age, so assuming it's set around the present day, you know, that makes them squarely Gen Z. And I found it really fascinating to think about how so much of what we think of, not just Gen Z, but like my generation of millennials, is that we can't stay off of our, well, really everyone now. Like, we can't stay off of our phones. And the fact that there's no internet, and all they

• 8:32Speaker 02

  can do is go through everything that's offline on their phone. It's kind of like, you know, before we were able to get Wi-Fi on planes. Like, what do you do with yourself for however long you're on the plane? And I found it really fascinating to see, like, I think the easy way to go would be to sort of like graph on to these young Gen Z kids, like, this existential crisis that is about like being undone by being unplugged in a way. And it doesn't go straight for that. It's not so obvious in that way. I don't think it's trying to graph on to this, like, a generational narrative, even though there are bits of that here and there. And I think that's kind of makes it work better for me because, again, the easy way would be to say like, this is a story about being Gen

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Z and not having internet. But like, it's less about that and more about, like, at one point, a character says, you know, like, I just realized I barely have any photos of my family in here. And it's like, that kind of gutted me. I was like, oh, man, yeah. Sometimes I look down, and I'm like, I only have pictures of my dogs.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  But they have like memes and stuff. So it's both deep, but not deep. And I think it toes that line really, really well for me, which is why I liked it so much.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  What you were saying, Glenn, like the restraint, the script, I found to be really satisfying over the course of the runtime of this movie because I'm part of kind of a situation like this is it's like unless you're checking off day by day by day, how long have we been out here? How long have we been doing this? How long has this been going on? And I thought the movie really elegantly handled something that could have been really hamfisted, like the passage of time. So you two are left disoriented in what the actual framework of this place that they're in is like, nobody screams at somebody at some point like, listen, it's been 792 days. Nobody does that. And it feels like that's the really easy impulse.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  And I feel like a sort of low hanging fruit would be to at some point, somebody starts trying to like kill people. They're like clawing their own skin off. And this movie's not trying to really go over the top. It really is just like, hey, let's take kind of a like smoking in your dorm room conversation, but do it in this way that is surprisingly intelligent and surprisingly dynamic, considering you're in the same like repetitive stretch of wooded road. God, I want to talk to the director about how many times they set up, okay, back here. Okay, turn it around. Like just like back to one, that same chunk of road to be on. And like the ways in which we see how other people have interacted with this world, the

• 11:02Speaker 03

  artifacts that they have left behind and what that lets us know about how other people have handled, succeeded or failed within this environment without really talking you through it. It's really hard not to do that. And shouts out to the producers who made this movie because committing to that after seeing, just seeing this as a script, you gotta have the faith and the imagination and the creative to carry this through in a way that is going to be intelligent and resonant and engaging. And they really pull it off.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. The tone of this, the calls are clearly coming from inside the house. This is made by a young filmmaker. It's about young people and it doesn't feel like it's a writer's room of 48 year old people saying, this does not feel like avocado toast, the movie.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Let's put a Terminator reference in here. That's what the kids are watching.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Even though that early dialogue makes you think, we're going to get a lecture about how they should, these kids should just use, stop using DoorDash, whatever, like, you know, it's just, but also the other thing is that this movie, to your point, Jordan, it's working with its hands tied behind its back and it still succeeds. These characters don't need to eat, sleep or poop. The men don't grow facial hair. So there are absolutely no visual or physical signifiers of time passing.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  They don't have a change of clothes, really. They got like some extra stuff in there because they were just going to get some food.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. But time passing is what this entire movie is about. And we, the audience, have to feel that or else this movie is dead on its feet. So all of that work gets shunted into the performances and the dialogue too. But these are actors who have to convey a kind of weariness that is purely mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, not physical, but we have to feel it in our chests. It also has a great sense of itself structurally because it kind of neatly defies what's called the memetic fallacy, which is where you're watching characters who are bored. That's great. But if we're bored watching them, dead, movie's dead.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  As soon as you start to feel that fatigue, something new is introduced to complicate, to intrigue, ultimately to frustrate, but that's part of the deal. I also like that it knows what it has to do. You mentioned this, both of you mentioned this in different ways, but you're busting out this giant metaphor, this big honking, central metaphor that is so on the nose. You cannot have your characters keep pointing to it. You have to leave it up to the audience to do, we're going to do it.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  It's kind of inescapable. It's an elephant, but you can't ever pull back and have your characters comment on it because that kills it. I know there are going to be critics and viewers out there who really delight in, you know, saying, oh, I identified this trope, therefore it's a cliche, therefore I'm smarter than the movie, therefore this feels overdone, it's hamfisted, or because you're dealing with this giant metaphor, it's pretentious, right? I know that that's going to be some criticism in this movie. I would push back on that because this film does a lot of work to keep things inside that car.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  This movie does such a good job not being pretentious. I gotta underscore.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  This movie feels like it would be stuck in its own head. It's really not.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Right. These characters are types, but they're specific enough that you feel like they have lives. There are several moments, and I took a checkmark each time one came, that there was a beat and you're like, you're waiting for the pullback. You're waiting for the grand statement, the thesis. But we never get it because these characters are behaving according to their characters, not to, they're not behaving because of what they represent as characters. And I thought that was such a big deal.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Well, we've got more to talk about. We'll be right back after this break.

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• 15:51Speaker 01

  Welcome back. Are you sure? Let's pick up with you.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  I feel like this whole exercise feels very like Rod Serling-esque in a way. I think we've already mentioned, but like, it's not really remarking time here. I think we know when the first 24 hours have gone by, but like then after that, everything is marked in terms of like miles and like how far they've driven. And again, the car just keeps going, like it doesn't run out of.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  It's at a quarter tank from the beginning to the end.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, just like Vin Diesel, living life a quarter mile at a time.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And what I love about that is like, there's just like a weariness to them and a acceptance to some extent of like what they're going through that feels very familiar and very like, if we wanted to try and graft more metaphor onto it, it's like, yes, like, are we as a society so used to the chaos of the world at this point that like, we're just all resigned to it in a way? But that resignation, it's not just resignation, though. There is this like push to, at least for one character, to like, just keep trying to figure out why this is happening to them and like, trying to crack a code. But then it's like, is this all futile? Probably like, what is the meaning of life? I don't know.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Is the journey the destination?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  That's what it is. And I mean, we've danced around the idea of these performances, but I really do think that there's just something about the way that they're able to keep the boredom. The boredom is part of that, but it doesn't make us bored.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  I think that's because as we reveal how each of them react to these situations, we also get like just enough hint of like what their relationships are like before and like in the normal times, in the before times. And, you know, there are some people who are going to be like, I needed more, like I wanted more, this is not enough, this feels sparse or underdeveloped. But I don't think like, if you've been friends with these other three people for so long, you're not going to have all that information. And again, we're in a very specific situation here where it's like, what is there to talk about? Like, we're not going to keep rehashing the past or whatever. And for me, at least, there's not too much exposition. There's like just enough. And as those things reveal themselves, like all the little things about like what they

• 17:59Speaker 02

  can do and them trying to figure out what's happening in the beginning. I don't know. It's just the ending, I was kind of like, ah, but then I was like, ah, I kind of like, it worked for me. It worked for me. I'm not the kind of person for whom that kind of thing would normally work for, but the way they threaded the needle leading up to that point, it did, it worked and it felt in line with how we had come to know these people. And again, to the point of the performances, we keep like dotting these in because I feel like the movie's just so fluid. Like, nobody's really being like the standout soprano here to like take from everybody else. They all work so well in concert with one another and they felt super lived in. By the time we really settle in with them, I believed that these were just people in a car who'd known each other forever.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I believed their lives had started before this movie began and I believed that their lives in some fashion went on after it ended again in some fashion. And like, you know, what you were saying, Glenn, about the memes, like the point where they're like, two of them in the car trading back and forth, like sort of jokes about like me on the endless road. It was like, that felt so real right there. And there were, it was great across the board in performances, but it was so impressive in these just tiny naturalistic flourishes where it really felt like these people were in the pocket, in the impossible constraint of the cab of this car. And also just the tidiness of that great intro you had about the road tripping. I was like, man, this would be my I-5 Central Valley corridor. Like, there is a relatable aspect.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Everybody has a piece of road where they're like, man, if I was on an endless road, this would probably be the one that I was trapped in for eternity. So like, that just felt like a very like, ah, the universal experience of everyone's got that endless road too, which is just very, had me panicking. God, what if I was stuck in the I-5 Central Valley corridor for this long? So, yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So let me toss this out, see what you think of it. This is certainly a metaphor for life, for postgraduate life. It's also, I would say, a COVID metaphor.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Fair, fair.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  We had our first wave of filmmakers grappling with the pandemic during the pandemic. So there were some remote distancing horror movies like Host, like the literal situation they're dealing with. But now, I think what's happening is that filmmakers have had time to process that experience, and they're reflecting it back on us at these kind of weird angles. We just had The Last House, which is a bunch of folks trapped in a house. Now this, they're trapped in a car, they're trying to get through it. I mean, I think we need some more examples here, but I think there's something bubbling up here, no?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I definitely thought about COVID while watching this because, again, I kept thinking, OK, these are people, assuming that this is set in the present day, our current, present day, they have lived through COVID already, which, again, the movie does not make any sort of direct connections to that. But my brain went, oh, well, it kind of makes sense that they would actually maybe be not OK necessarily.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Equipped for this?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  But equipped, like, and also, again, that weariness that settles in after however many thousand miles. Like, I can't imagine going through COVID without having internet access. Now, that sounds like, wow. But still, those of us who are still here, we've made it through, we've made it on the other side. And so it's hard for me not to think that this movie, in some ways, is pulling from that. And also, just these ideas about, like, why us? Like, why are we dealing, like, is this punishment? Is this purgatory? Like, are we dead? Like, all these questions, like, why us? Glenn, as you said earlier, like, it's as if, like, some god decided to punish you. It's like, no, this is just what's happening. And I think that's all simmering below the surface here, for sure.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Like, I don't think you can have gone through COVID and not get a little bit of that sense of, like, it seemed like, at a certain point, like, for a lot of us, this might never end, and we might be locked inside forever. And of course, that's not the case, but that's what it feels like. And this movie, I think, really kind of, at least put me back in that space to some extent.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  I feel like the posing of the question and the ability to play with it, I think, is such an exciting testament to, like, that reality of, like, the movie that you make and then the world that your movie arrives in. Inevitably, this filmmaker and these actors were formed in some way, whatever the specifics are, who knows, by the lockdowns, COVID, the pandemic. And there have been bottle movies in the past. There have been endless loop, but however, those movies didn't arrive in a time where we could sit there and ask, like, wow, as people who were trapped in their homes and wondering, is this gonna ever end? And is, do I die here? And what if we have already told all the stories and there are no new memories?

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Like, in the throes of, like, perhaps some people who are very adherent to the restrictions around lockdown, being like, will I ever have a new experience ever again? Like, I hadn't honestly thought about it at all while I was watching it. And now you're saying it's like, yeah, this person has a very immediate reference in their life for, like, maybe they missed a graduation and were stuck in a cube during this time. And like, how on earth wouldn't you think, if you were a filmmaker, at least of making a movie about that, you didn't follow through on it, maybe, but I feel like every director out there, perhaps, like, in this kind of age range, is probably like, I could make a movie about being stuck inside.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Like, the notion, too, of, like, a movie like this encapsulating an amber, what we're still dealing with, when we just go on about our lives every day, in their normal comings and going, be like, hey, guys, remember that really bad thing that happened to literally everyone? I mean, what an unbelievable social referent to have in our existence. Amazing, wow.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  We talked about how filmmakers, how creators were gonna grapple with COVID on this show. And Aisha, you said something very smart about how, like, somebody's gonna be walking down the street in a scene, they're gonna see a mask on the street. This is so much a more interesting way to do that. This is just to come at this, at this oblique angle, and yet to stoke those memories and then to do something with it, not just to point out and say, remember that, but to kind of say, we got through it, and we got through it together.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And ultimately, that's all there is.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  It's the complete opposite of editing, thank goodness.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  That was kind of what I felt watching, Eddie, it was like, wow, are we still living in that movie? Because we kind of are. And then watching this, it's like, how many people feel like they're still in the in-between place? How many people feel like something was taken from them, where they're still stuck in the middle? Like, something didn't restart, they were shoved off their track and, like, haven't found their way back on. It was just like, there's a quiet harrowingness about that. And this just did it in the most, like, soft way.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  That is really admirable, and really, I hate this as a, like, a review of anything, but so human.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  It was so human.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I mean, there's no way that something that catastrophic, we can just kind of put that behind. And I think that this movie acknowledges that, and it also acknowledges that, like, there are some things which have answers or have logic to them, or things that you can try to make sense of. And then there are other things where it's just like, you just gotta go with it. You just have to let it happen. And you can try and make yourself more comfortable, or try to adapt to it, and that is the way humans can work, but also, like, trying to search for meaning in it. You're not gonna be satisfied.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  And-

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Unless you just love the pursuit of that. Like, we need to be satisfied in the pursuit.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, tough to find.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  This movie lives in that, and I like that it lives in that messiness.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we are all recommending this film. And listeners, if you haven't seen it, and it sounds bleak and depressing, I'm gonna tell you, it's not. Because it's about getting through it, at the end of the day.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  And it's a chewy conversation about a very chewy movie, and y'all should check it out. That brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Crucial, Aisha Harris, thank you so much for being here.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Put me in the endless road with the roundtable of PCHH, guys. And I will be stimulated forever.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And joining us on that endless road is who produced this episode, Lennon Sherburne, Hulsa Batham, and Mike Katsev. It was edited by our executive producer, Barton Girdwood. Our showrunner is Jessica Riddy, she's here too. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music there, what's on the radio. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

• 26:21Speaker 05

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