It Ends (2026): Neon's Road-Trip Horror, and Is It Scary?

It Ends premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 7, 2025. After its festival run it had a limited digital window through the Letterboxd Video Store in December 2025, a 48-hour rental that closed in early January 2026. Neon then acquired the film and opened it in five New York and Los Angeles theaters on August 21, 2026, expanding it nationwide a week later on August 28.

The film runs 89 minutes and is rated R. Alexander Ullom directed it from his own script and edited it himself. The four leads are Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole, none of them established names at the time of release.

Four recent college graduates take a late-night drive for food, planning one last hangout before they split up for good. They turn off the main road and end up on a two-lane highway that has no end. The landscape outside the car loops back on itself. Other people turn up on the road, some lost and some hostile, and the group settles into a grim routine of resting and staying alive while the miles add up toward nothing.

The horror is the situation more than any single monster. Ullom uses the endless road as a stand-in for the open stretch after graduation, when the path forward stops being laid out for you. Reviewers have read it as a film about purpose and drift, about what people do when the structure of their life falls away. It keeps its specifics vague on purpose, which is part of why the ending divides viewers.

Having watched it, we think the allegory reading is the right one, and the film is direct enough about it that working it out is not the difficulty. Our disagreement with the critics is not about what It Ends means. It is about whether the film earns the ninety minutes it takes to say it.

Critics who caught It Ends on the festival circuit were close to unanimous, and the wide release held most of that. It is Certified Fresh at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes from 110 reviews, and trade and genre outlets praised it as inventive and assured for a first feature. The festival-only figure was 100% across 24 reviews, so the score came down as the critic pool widened, which is the usual pattern rather than a backlash.

General-audience reaction has run much cooler. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score sits at 48%, and it has held there as the sample grew past 100 ratings. On Letterboxd, where the audience skews toward film enthusiasts, reactions run warmer and closer to the critics. The gap mostly comes down to expectation. It Ends is sold on a high-concept horror hook, but it spends much of its runtime as a quiet character piece and ends on a question rather than an answer, so viewers who came for a conventional road-horror thriller are the ones most likely to bounce off it.

Our own score puts us on the audience side of that split, and further down it than most. The Curator Score is 3.8 out of 10. We are not going to pretend that is the consensus read, and the review above is the whole of our case: the film withholds a payoff by design, and the journey it offers instead did not carry the runtime for us. If the ambiguity is the part you go to horror for, the critics are better guides to this one than we are.

It Ends is not a jump-scare movie, and we can be exact about that. We counted the jump scares while watching and there are two, both of them major, and both inside the first eighteen minutes. Nothing in the remaining hour and change is built to make you jump. The timestamps are on the film page.

On our five axes it scores Fear 3.5 out of 10. That is the same rung as Hostel and The Platform, films that are punishing rather than frightening, and well above The Wicker Man. Atmosphere is 4.5, which is the more revealing number: the film reaches for a register of cosmic indifference and does not sustain it strongly enough to carry the fear. Intensity is 3.5, so the ordeal it puts a viewer through is milder than Gonjiam or Night of the Living Dead.

It is close to bloodless. Gore is 1.5 out of 10, near the bottom of our scale, a half point above Gonjiam and Annihilation further down this page. If you avoid horror because of what it shows you, this is not the film that will bother you. The thing it asks of you is patience.

Our full review of It Ends is on the film page, alongside the five-axis score profile.

It Ends is Alexander Ullom's first feature. He wrote and directed the film and edited it himself. He made it on a small budget with a largely unknown cast. He has used the phrase "hangout horror" for what he was after, a horror film that gives as much weight to the friendship in the car as to the threat outside it.

Neon acquiring the film fits the distributor's pattern. Neon has built its horror reputation on specific, director-driven films rather than franchise product, and Longlegs and the recent Leviticus are two recent bets in that mold. A debut feature with a festival record and a strong critic response is the kind of title Neon tends to buy and then market hard. Our Leviticus preview covers Neon's rollout of that title, from its Sundance pickup to when it reaches streaming.