Release Date: August 21, 2026 (wide theatrical, Neon) — after a March 7, 2025 SXSW premiere and a December 10, 2025 digital rental run via Letterboxd Video Store
Runtime: 89 minutes (1h 29min)
Rated: R – for pervasive language
Production Companies: Growing Up Dead Films, Snoot Entertainment, Above .330, Aymara Films, Please Hold Pictures
Producers: Carrie Carusone, Evan Barber
Cinematography: Evan Draper, Jazleana Jones
Editing: Alexander Ullom
Music/Composer: Matthew Robert Cooper
It Ends (2026)
Director & Writer: Alexander Ullom
Cast: Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, Mitchell Cole
There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t need fangs, a mask, or a body count to work. Alexander Ullom bets his entire debut feature on that idea, and with It Ends, he wins. Forget vampires, demons, cults, and creatures crawling out of the dark — the thing that’ll actually keep you up at night here is a question you’ve probably already asked yourself: what happens after the panic wears off and you’re still not sure what any of this is for?
That question hits different depending on when you graduated. The pandemic left an entire generation stranded in the same emotional limbo at once — a shared, communal rupture that scrambled how people relate to work, to each other, to the idea of a future that was supposed to be mapped out by now. Elevated horror had been building toward something before COVID hit, films that worked on your heart rate and your headspace in equal measure. Ullom picks up that thread and points it directly at the class that graduated into the pandemic — a group that inherited a broken job market, a shakier economy, and a mental health crisis, all while being asked to become adults with none of the physical companionship that used to make that transition survivable.
Ullom would know. He’s spoken about how James, the group’s most controlling and rational voice, tracks closest to his own postgrad experience — wrestling with dissociative depression after graduating into a world that had just shut its doors. That lived-in specificity is a big part of why the metaphor never feels borrowed or secondhand. This is someone working through something real.
What’s most impressive is how much philosophical weight Ullom packs into a film this short and, on paper, this simple. The premise barely needs a logline: four college friends pile into a Jeep Cherokee for one last night out together before life sends them in separate directions.
James (Phinehas Yoon) is the group’s analytical, controlling center — though he starts the night silly and upbeat, fully aware this might be one of the last times they’re all in a room, or a car, together. Day (Akira Jackson) plays easygoing and unbothered on the surface, but there’s clearly more sitting underneath that facade, waiting to surface. Fisher (Noah Toth) is James’ counterpart in the goofing-around department early on, the group’s comic relief who quietly becomes its emotional barometer as things shift. And Tyler (Mitchell Cole) is the quiet, gruff one, the friend who skipped college for an HVAC path and is reconnecting with the other three after time apart.
With these four at the wheel, Ullom sends the audience down an infinite road that raises just as many questions as the characters are asking themselves once they realize what they’re actually trapped in.
It’s easy to see why It Ends gets filed under horror, even though it doesn’t play by many of the genre’s usual rules. It’s working the same unsettling territory this year’s Backrooms and Exit 8 have staked out — dread built from geometry and repetition instead of a monster with a face. Ullom just trades hallways for open highway. There’s not much gore here, not much violence, not many jump scares, and nothing especially disturbing to look at. But if you’re an overthinker, a philosophical mind, or your average pessimist, this film will get under your skin in a way plenty of “scarier” movies won’t.
I won’t get into the specific conversations or story beats — part of what makes this film work is discovering them cold, the same way its characters do. But a few things are worth calling out.
The acting carries a distinctly Gen-Z touch and flair that feels relatable and topical without ever tipping into caricature. The four leads have chemistry that reads as completely natural, and each embodies a genuinely distinct way of grappling with the same unanswerable questions: what’s the purpose of any of this? Where does it lead? What’s holding us back, and what’s actually pushing us forward?
Cinematographers Evan Draper and Jazleana Jones do a lot of the heavy lifting here, making a single stretch of road feel wide open and suffocating in the same breath. Matthew Robert Cooper’s score never announces itself; it just sits underneath the silence, the way real dread tends to.
Yes, the film is repetitive — but that’s the point, not a flaw. The shots are simple, the dialogue is simple, but every time the characters stumble into a breakthrough, their reactions say it all, and you’ll find yourself agreeing, disagreeing, or landing somewhere entirely new on the same epiphanies they’re working through. There are long stretches of silence, quiet observation, mundane conversation that goes nowhere fast — and in service of what this film is actually trying to say, it all works.
It Ends isn’t going to land for anyone chasing a body count or a good scare. But for anyone who’s ever sat with the question of what comes next and come up empty, it’s essential viewing — a film confident enough to leave its exit unmarked, and trust its audience to sit with that. Ullom has announced himself as a filmmaker worth watching closely, and whatever he does after this, I’ll be first in line.