Liminal spaces are in the air, and in the zeitgeist. If you never knew that phrase previously, you’ve gotten acquainted with it through the popularity of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, and to a lesser extent, Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8. Liminal spaces are sort of the in-between spaces, existing in their own reality with its own rules, or possibly no rules at all. They could even be that purgatory between life and death.

Alexander Ullom’s It Ends toys with all these notions, and it might have been a trendsetter rather than a coattail-rider if it had found distribution earlier in its existence, having debuted at South by Southwest back at the start of 2025. The film is getting an Australian release now, and that’s fortuitous, because those other films have increased our appetite for people who find themselves betwixt and between, possibly with no way out. It Ends is worthy of any attention it might now get.

Four university aged friends have just left their university after a friend came to pick them up and help them move out. They are James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth). Early in their reunion, familiar dynamics are starting to set in as they ride in a 1994 Jeep Cherokee, two in the front and two in the back, with Tyler at the wheel. They needle each others’ insecurities. They express muted feelings of warmth. They wrestle with a hypothetical scenario in which they are either being protected by or hunted by various groups of animals, debating which would be better as protectors and which as adversaries.

Innocuously enough, Tyler makes a turn dictated by the GPS. It’s a rustic route but the GPS insists they should continue straight ahead along the recommended path. Until suddenly it dead-ends in a mysteriously placed patch of forest, forcing them to turn around. After which there is no turn that will get them back on any road they recognise, nor anything but miles and miles of forest, without a single other car on the road. And stopping by the side of the road to get their bearings only attracts malicious forces from the nearby woods.

Whatever is happening to them – and all sorts of theories are proposed – it can’t go on indefinitely. The car is going to run out of petrol at some point. Only it doesn’t, and neither do they get hungry, and neither do they feel sleepy.

There are a lot of possible interpretations to what might be happening to the four characters in It Ends, and Ullom is not eager for us to fix on any one of them as a definitive explanation. He’s more interested in looking at what happens to them as they try to make sense of their situation, as they develop routines to cope with it, and ultimately, as they succumb to despair over it. That shouldn’t be taken as an indication of how long this goes on, and whether it’s the entirety of the movie. When you aren’t eating or sleeping and when merely a cessation of movement exposes you to mortal threats, despair can set in pretty quickly.

It Ends is quite compelling in the moment, functioning as a sort of social experiment whose ultimate goal is to analyse human behaviour. Whether it becomes significantly more profound than that is a “mileage may vary” proposition. Certainly there are deeper resonances that can be excavated from these raw materials, and some viewers might prefer it if Ullom were pointing them toward one of them. There are also obvious possible interpretations to what’s happening and how it functions as a metaphor, which doesn’t make those possible interpretations any less resonant.

But one of the things these four openly grapple with is whether what they’re going through has any meaning, and that’s a universal experience for any of us on a long treadmill that seems to be going nowhere. Can you persist if you believe it all might be without a point? And for how long?

The actual genre pleasures of It Ends are somewhat muted. It’s more a pschological thriller than a horror, though there are horror elements here too. It’s a contemplative film in which the performances are good enough to maintain our interest, and the mystery is beguiling enough to keep us persisting – even as we start to wonder whether the filmmaker is going to give us any answers, or whether we even need them.

 

It Ends is curerntly playing in Australian cinemas.