Liminal spaces aren’t just for furniture stores: they’re pretty terrifying when they’re outside, too. Following the success of Backrooms, Neon has its own take on in-between places with first-time director Alex Ullom’s It Ends. And while it’s not accurate to say that It Ends was influenced by Backrooms—Ullom wrote the film eight years ago, according to Esquire—the timing is certainly auspicious. The first trailer, which dropped today, sets an ominous tone as four recent college graduates (Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole) take what they think is a shortcut but turns out to be a endless road from which they cannot escape.
The film’s official logline reads, “Some wrong turns last forever. A group of recent grads head out on a late night drive for grub, hoping to enjoy one final hangout before their paths diverge. Instead, they accidentally turn onto a never-ending, two-lane hellscape surrounded by untold horrors and cosmic forces beyond their understanding. Cramped together inside a Jeep Cherokee and with the miles stretching infinitely ahead, they face a choice: embrace their new existence or fight to escape it.”
As Ullom told Esquire, the film is a not-so-veiled metaphor for what Gen Z young adults are going through right now. “It Ends is through the POV of kids that are inheriting the world right now,” he said. “One of the core emotions of the liminal space is something’s off, something’s wrong. We have rejected nature. The thing that’s behind the veil is actually just the fucking corporate boardroom. Kids right now, they’re inheriting a burning house. The similarities are the fact that there is an obsession with ‘What the fuck is this all heading to? Where’s this going?'”
It’s common for young adults to feel anxious about the future, but there’s no denying that Gen Z is facing a unique kind of uncertainty. Taking that amorphous anxiety and manifesting it into a twisted reality might be exactly what we need to help us process all of our intrusive thoughts.
It Ends hits theaters on August 21.
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