Making a movie is difficult. Doing it with tens of thousands of dollars, four unknown actors and a Jeep is even harder. Yet it is exactly what the very young Alexander Ullom did with It Ends by collecting an initial budget of just $30,000 and turning it into his first feature film. Presented at the SXSW and then collected by Neon in the United States, It Ends comes from October 28 in Italian cinemas with I Wonder Pictures. A small productive miracle, then. Magistral production strategy operation or new horror promise? Let’s find out.
It Ends: chilometro dopo chilometro
A year after graduation, James, Day, Fisher and Tyler gather for a move and a chat. Someone has completely changed their lives compared to college, someone has remained in stasis, but no matter: the relationship between them is always. All regular, I mean, until after wronging a turn the four end up on a road that seems to have no end. No crossroads, no houses, no chance to go back. And every time they stop, waves of disturbing figures ready to tear them apart.. Gasoline doesn’t end, nobody seems to need to eat or sleep anymore and the kilometers continue to accumulate. Trapped on a journey without destination, the four only remains to drive and try to understand why.
It ends: la vita fra quattro finestrini
Even the poorest film is a logistical miracle, and It Ends is far from being it. Ullom writes, directs and mounts a theatrical road movie, built around a car, a street stretch and four actors. More: it almost always manages to make the poverty of means seem a choice rather than a compulsion. The car becomes alternatively a refuge, a prison and a living room, while the outside field turns any wood into a potentially endless space à la Backrooms.
More than anything, the movie has a good idea. The eternal road is a transparent but effective metaphor for that post-university limbo where life suddenly stops having predetermined stages and in front it seems to be only a terrifying amount of future. Ullom wrote it a little more than twenty years starting from his own crisis in the transition to adulthood, and sincerity feels.
Allungare il brodo
The problem is that this good idea comes out very, very soon, when It Ends still has almost an entire movie ahead. The repetition is clearly part of the point — this is an endless road — but being conceptually justified does not automatically make the repetition interesting. After an hour it is difficult not to think that we are looking at a great short film that has been added a lot of broth. And this is where It Ends unintentionally raises a more interesting question of the film itself: what films are made because someone wants to do them, and how many why it is useful that they exist? For a young director, having directed a feature film is professionally different from a short. In the same way, today the horror seems to have become almost a mandatory entry to independent cinema: between the contained cost, tolerance for unknown actors and a pre-built audience. But are we sure every young director has to go through this door? And that all ideas should become feature films?
It Ends shows us that with very little you can still make cinema. Perhaps the next step is to remember that making a movie doesn’t necessarily mean making a horror feature film.
Il cast
Phinehas Yoon is James, methodical and determined to find an explanation; Akira Jackson plays Day, more pragmatic but crossed by deep restlessness. Noah Toth is Fisher, the jullar of the group who uses humor as a defense mechanism, while Mitchell Cole plays Tyler, a veteran who just returned to civil life and more distant than others from the old balance of the group.
L’articolo It ends and the curse of the indie horror — The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
