Review: Inventive and inspiring, 'It Ends' brings 'Backrooms' into the backwoods

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Set us as preferred “It Ends,” a microbudget marvel by 20-something writer-director Alexander Ullom, has a straightforward premise that expands in your imagination.Four school pals — go-getter James (Phinehas Yoon), drop-out Tyler (Mitchell Cole), anxious Fisher (Noah Toth) and creative Day (Akira Jackson) — pile into a Jeep just after college graduation.The car turns onto a dark road that, to the youngsters’ growing unease, appears to stretch on forever through an infinite forest.

There’s no safe place to pull over, no signs pointing toward escape, no assurance that their lives have a destination.Stop moving and a horde of desperate, violent strangers sprint from the woods to try to steal their car.

Keep going … for how long? Is this hell, purgatory or just a cosmic punchline?“It Ends” premiered at SXSW in the spring of 2025, over a year before audiences stormed Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms,” yet the two breakout filmmakers share a suspicion that our seemingly ordinary existence hides something very, very wrong.The scale of the peril is hard to comprehend and harder to articulate; they’re more curious to explore the crisis than find a fix.

What matters is that humanity feels lost.Movies After developing his concept over years, the 20-year-old Parsons worked with Oscar-nominated actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve along with A24 to make it happen.Everyone in the car already seems to sense it even before this particular ride goes awry.

Yoon’s dour James has impressively (and depressingly) mapped out his next few money-making decades down to his eventual diminished sperm count.To him, the future “seems like it sucks ass.” Weary Tyler has resigned himself to blue-collar work.

Fisher and Day can’t even secure jobs, stuck literally and metaphorically frittering away their youth in the back ...