In Review: ‘It Ends,’ ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

Programming note: We had a lot of reviews this week. This is the second installment of two. For reviews of Mutiny and Insidious: Out of the Further, check out yesterday's column.

It Ends
Dir. Alexander Ullom
90 min. 

(We never like to discourage subscribers from reading our work here at The Reveal—we do not have, say, waterslides to offer as a secondary business model—but consider this an off-ramp on the infinite road of It Ends, writer-director Alexander Ullom’s ingenious feature debut. The best way to experience this bold and philosophically knotty film is to confront a vexing situation exactly as its characters do, one new discovery at a time. I still intend to tread lightly, but here’s your opportunity to bail out and watch it cold.) 

When three recent graduates pile into a car with an old friend for a road trip in It Ends, the conversation percolates around a meme-driven thought experiment that they’re bandying about for fun. Given four different options—10,000 rats, 50 hawks, five gorillas, and one man with a gun—which two would you choose to defend you while the other two hunted you? The responses to this hypothetical are revealing and hilarious, an early sign that writer-director Alexander Ullom has command over a scenario that’s a challenge to sustain, but just the exercise itself sets the tone for the existential odyssey to come. What is the point of conversations like these, other than to pass the time? And what do you do when time itself no longer seems to exist? You might need more than 50 hawks and five gorillas to handle the infinite. 

The pleasant, empty banter between the three graduates—the quiet, intellectual James (Phinehas Yoon) in the passenger seat, the subtly troubled Day (Akira Jackson) and carefree Fisher (Noah Toth) in the back—seems tolerable enough to Tyler (Mitchell Cole), who isn’t as connected to the group as he might have been in the past, but appears happy enough to give them a lift. When he turns off down a forested side road, however, Tyler is perplexed to drive for miles without encountering any kind of off-ramp or intersection, so he makes a U-turn and heads back to where they started. Yet the initial entrance to the road is now blocked by a dense line of trees and when they pause to look around, they’re attacked by a desperate mob of humans scrambling to get into the car. Their only option is to peel off again in the hope that they’ll find somewhere to turn off eventually. 

The catch of It Ends is that no such escape exists. And as the road stretches on, they learn that they’re not tired or hungry and the car never loses any gas. While there are some important wrinkles that Ullom adds later, the gist of It Ends is that these four characters are trapped in a kind of purgatory where they have to keep driving, which at times forces them into philosophical or religious queries on the what’s and why’s of their predicament and at others leads them to cope with open-ended down time. The absence of physical fatigue greatly amplifies their mental fatigue, and prompts revelations about their interior lives and their basic will to survive. 

That’s heady stuff, a clever riff on Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit by way of The Twilight Zone. Yet Ullom’s willingness to see his premise through challenges genre expectations, too: That early attack from the zombified humans in the wood initially marks It Ends as a horror film, but when such attacks become a predictable, Groundhog Day-like event, the threat drains away and the horror turns more abstract. It’s a credit to Ullom’s script and his cast, particularly Yoon as the driest wit and deepest thinker of the four, that the grind of the infinite is felt without making the film itself seem rudderless. The only hiccup with It Ends is that Ullom has to honor his title and come up with a conclusion that doesn’t betray the premise. A satisfying exit may be unachievable, but as a thought experiment in itself, the film teases out bigger questions than which animals you’d take in a fight. — Scott Tobias

It Ends opens in limited release today, perhaps on an infinite run.

The Rivals of Amziah King
Dir. Andrew Patterson
131 min.

Back in 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdown, Andrew Patterson quietly made one of the most striking debuts in recent years with The Vast of Night, a confident, cryptic low-budget science fiction film made with tremendous technical bravado. It’s one of those movies that turns admirers into “you have to see this” proselytizers while they eagerly anticipate whatever its creator will do next.* Anyone holding their breath can exhale with the release of The Rivals of Amziah King though it’s hard anyone was anticipating it as the sort of film Patterson would make next, in large part because it shifts freely from one sort of movie to another at several points. And though it makes one or two shifts too many, it still confirms Patterson as a formidable talent with a vision all his own.

(* Or at least it used to. Originally distributed by Amazon, it’s currently not available to stream anywhere and has never had a physical media release. Patterson has apparently suggested that will change, however.)

The film begins with an amiable, impromptu jam session at a small Oklahoma town’s drive-in restaurant in which local musicians gather around Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey), a charismatic beekeeper/philosopher-in-residence with a welcoming demeanor that puts almost everyone he meets at ease. Then, in a breathless rush, the local police ask Amziah to assist in identifying the origin of some stolen honey, a request that inadvertently leads to an industrial accident, a trip to a hospital, and Amziah’s next-morning reunion with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, who beautifully plays off McConaughey in her promising big-screen debut), a young Native American woman who lived as a foster child with Amziah and his late wife before being reclaimed by her mother.

As if no time has passed, Amziah takes her under his wing, shows her the ropes of the honey business, conscripts her into the role of a back-up singer at yet another impromptu jam session (they seem to pop up wherever he goes), and shares his views on community and human nature by drawing comparisons between pot luck dinners and beehives. Patterson, who also wrote the film under the pseudonym James Montague, directs these scenes with a restless energy that’s counterbalanced by Amziah’s warmth, turning the film into a glowing, song-filled character study—before abruptly shifting gears. But not without warning: the film establishes early on that honey is quite valuable and that there are unscrupulous operators more than willing to take what’s not their own.

It’s the ground covered after that gear shift that proves rocky. A second half that begins as a gripping, rural mystery film ultimately takes its characters places that viewers might have a hard time following without some reluctance, as it inches toward a final stretch that leads it to a much different, darker spot than the one in which it began. Which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. Missteps and all, a film this original and unpredictable is too rare to ignore. —Keith Phipps

The Rivals of Amziah King is now in limited release.