It Ends proves you don’t need money, you need one good idea
Eighty thousand dollars, four actors and a road that never stops. It's the best horror film of the year.
It Ends · Dir. Alexander Ullom · Neon · In theaters now
Four friends drive home after a night out. They get onto a two-lane road and the road does not end. Same landmarks, over and over. People come stumbling out of the treeline with nothing useful to say. There is no exit and there is no explanation coming.
That is the entire film, and it is the best horror film released this year.
The restraint is the achievement
Alexander Ullom made this for $80,000, and the constraint clearly shaped every decision in a way that helped. There is no creature to reveal, no mythology to explain, no third-act character who arrives to tell everyone what is happening. The film commits to the premise and then simply refuses to blink, which takes more discipline than any amount of money can buy.
What makes it hold is the four performances. Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth and Mitchell Cole are carrying a film with one location and no relief, and they play the deterioration honestly. The early stretch where they are still treating it as a funny inconvenience is worse than the later panic, because you can see exactly how long it takes a person to admit that something is wrong.
Variety’s Siddhant Adlakha reached for Sartre’s No Exit, and that comparison holds. This is a film about four people who have run out of options and have to keep being people anyway.
Go find it
92% on Rotten Tomatoes across 105 critics, 74 on Metacritic, and $813,849 at the box office. That last number is a ten-fold return on the budget and still nowhere near the audience this deserves.
It premiered at SXSW in March 2025 and Neon held it for seventeen months. If it is playing anywhere near you, go before the run ends. This is the kind of film that people spend the next decade recommending to each other.
