This past year, we’ve seen a noteworthy rise in “liminal horror”. More specifically, we got hit with Exit 8 immediately before the haymaker of Backrooms. And there are several legit reasons why this subgenre has caught on.

For decades now, we’ve seen an unstoppable deluge of horror films that engage audiences and bring in box office dollars at minimal cost and quick turnaround. And by their very nature, liminal horror films are spartan enough that splurging on spectacle would defeat the point. In fact, the very point of liminal horror is the unending monotony and drudgery of modern life, in which every day is the same and there doesn’t seem to be any point in doing anything. That’s a deeply relatable anxiety in the world as it is right now.

Here’s the problem: There are only so many ways to depict dull and unending monotony on film. It’s such a uniquely specific and minimalist statement that there’s a limit to how many ways it can be made. In other words, I’m worried that this particular trend will have a pitifully short shelf life. I give it a year, maybe two, before some work of liminal horror comes along and we all shrug it off because it’s nothing we haven’t seen already.

In the meantime, here we are with It Ends, the writing/directing feature debut of Alexander Ullom. This one was made and marketed as a liminal horror film in which three hapless college grads are stuck in a car on the same endless road going straight through a dense forest without any chance to turn off.

…Oh, wait, did I say three? There are actually four characters in the car. (Plus Ullom himself in a last-second cameo right at the end.) But I only ever saw three in the trailer. Whoo boy.

We open with Tyler (Mitchell Cole), who came around to help his three freshly-graduated friends move back to their hometown. James (Phinehas Yoon) is relentlessly level-headed to the point where he comes off as a dispassionate jerk, so he’s basically the super-ego of the crew. Fisher (Noah Toth) has no brain-to-mouth filter, so panicky and impulsive that he’s often a threat to himself and others, so there’s our id. That leaves us with Day (Akira Jackson) as our ego figure to mediate between the others.

Anyway, the plot starts in earnest when our characters take a seemingly innocuous turn and somehow end up on a forest road that stretches on and on with no intersections. And the U-Haul with all their stuff somehow didn’t get caught up in the same trap, so all they’ve got is the Jeep and whatever they had on them at the time. Naturally, the bulk of the runtime is comprised of the characters experimenting and figuring out the rules. Here’s a quick rundown.

• They’re not on a loop. It’s a straight road that inexplicably goes on and on and on for some indeterminate length, possibly forever.
• Their cell phones have no signal, but infinite battery charge.
• The car never runs out of gas, and it will stay drivable long after its individual parts should’ve worn out.
• Nobody in the car will ever be tired or hungry or horny or thirsty. Bathroom breaks are no longer necessary.

Most important of all is the 90-second rule. The car can only stop for 90 seconds before strange people inexplicably come running from the woods like zombies in a Danny Boyle picture. But what’s interesting is that they only go after the car, and we never see them attack anyone outside the car.

Obviously, the threat of death by a mindless horde is sufficient motivation to keep going. Which means that if the horde wasn’t there, our characters would have no reason not to simply turn off the car, stop driving, and escape the confines of their Jeep. Moreover, while the threat of a gruesome death is horrifying, it’s also one likely way out of this purgatory. It’s really quite fascinating how the characters have that balanced kind of relationship with the monster — I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since Life of Pi.

Otherwise… that’s pretty much the whole movie. It’s 90-some-odd minutes of the characters trying to keep themselves and each other occupied as they drive continuously and reason out whatever they can of what’s going on. We’ve got conflict between the characters who want to keep going purely out of spite and those who would rather give up than pretend this is any kind of life. We’ve got extended montages to try and compress the overwhelming volume of nothing in between scenes.

Granted, it’s certainly a well-crafted movie. I’m consistently astounded by the camerawork, editing, and production design that all make such inventive use of such a confined setting. And while the sound design is overdone, I can appreciate how it’s taking on so much heavy lifting.

But I have two major problems with this movie, and they both come back to the fundamental premise.

For one thing, there’s simply no getting around the fact that we’re stuck in a car with these characters for the entire runtime. Which means that while they’re bickering and nagging and blaming each other, we’re watching the whole thing in extreme closeup. And as long as they keep moving, we don’t even get the possibility of a jump scare or a sudden attack to shake things up. It’s not pleasant.

The other main factor is that by virtue of the “liminal horror” subgenere, we know that there will be no answers forthcoming. There’s no way to make any of this make sense. This whole thing is a metaphor for the senseless monotony of life itself, thus explaining the concept would mean explaining the meaning of life itself, which in turn would mean that life has any meaning at all, which goes entirely against the point of the genre.

This is a problem innate to the liminal horror genre: Of course the characters are going to try and figure out what’s going on, but the audience knows they can’t. So, how can the characters’ futile search for knowledge be made into something that isn’t a pointless waste of time? Backrooms got around this by dovetailing the characters’ existential dread into coping with grief and trauma. With Exit 8, the lead characters only had to understand the concept just enough to somehow win the game and escape.

With this movie, there’s basically nothing. Granted, it’s kind of fun to watch the characters’ experiments in trying to figure out the rules of this purgatory. But when they take up so much screentime trying to figure out why this is happening, what they did to deserve this, and how to get out, it’s perfectly clear that they’re talking out of their asses and wasting time with shit that will never lead to anything. Then again, it’s not like they have anything to do aside from wasting time, that’s kinda the point.

A central theme of liminal horror is that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Thus we know that in this picture, the end of the road is either nonexistent/never shown, or a huge disappointment. Which, again, takes a great deal of tension and interest away from any discussion about the end of the road. The best we get is the occasional discussion about how long it takes for which characters to tap out and say they’d rather sit in the forest than keep on driving.

The big problem I keep coming back to with It Ends is that the characters are perpetually at odds with the very themes and nature of the “liminal horror” genre. It’s difficult to keep the characters and their actions interesting when we the audience know that nothing they say or do matters, and the filmmakers can’t quite find a way to square that circle. And of course it’s never easy to spend 90 unbroken minutes stuck in a car with four people who can’t stop arguing with each other over petty bullshit.

What’s sad is that in many ways, the film is a victim of timing. If the film had come out last year (and it did indeed get an online release last year, in addition to multiple festival screenings), it likely would’ve been hailed as a game-changer. But then Backrooms and (to a lesser extent) Exit 8 came along to cement the liminal horror genre and It Ends only looks like an also-ran by comparison.

To be clear, it’s not necessarily a bad movie. The actors all do a solid job with what they’ve got, and I can’t give enough praise to the filmmakers for all their innovation in shooting/editing/designing a film set almost entirely in a car interior. Unfortunately — as with Exit 8 before it — the filmmakers tried to make a statement about the dull and pointless monotony of life, only to fall into their own trap and make a dull and pointless film.

I know this movie has its critical praise, and I get the appeal of the film on a surface level. But ultimately, this is a film I respect more than I like. The best I can do is a home video recommendation.