Critics Are Calling ‘It Ends’ One of the Best Debuts of the Year. Can It Hold That Momentum to Wide Release?

Alexander Ullom’s existential road-horror debut turned heads at SXSW. It almost never made it to theaters at all.

Some horror movies announce themselves with a premise built for a poster. It Ends announces itself with a question that never gets fully answered. That turns out to be exactly the point. Alexander Ullom‘s debut feature premiered at SXSW 2025 in the Narrative Feature Competition. It left festival audiences wrestling with a film that starts as a hangout movie and ends as something considerably stranger.

Four recent college graduates pile into a Jeep Cherokee for a late-night food run. It should be simple. It isn’t. The road has no exits, stretches on with no explanation, and gradually strips away every rational framework the group tries to impose on their situation. Science fiction, religious horror, shared hallucination, all get tested and discarded, until all that’s left is each other. Ullom, working with a cast entirely in their twenties, keeps the film grounded in specific, believable character dynamics even as the situation grows increasingly surreal.

A Debut That Almost Never Reached Theaters

The film’s path to release was nearly as strange as its premise. After SXSW raves in March 2025, It Ends couldn’t attract a single distributor. Ullom has said the film was “dead in the water,” and he was close to uploading it to YouTube himself. A chance conversation with filmmaker and movie influencer Nicolas Curcio changed that.

Letterboxd’s CEO saw the discussion online and offered the film a spot in the launch lineup for Letterboxd Video Store, a new platform for undistributed independent films. That exposure caught NEON’s attention. The studio acquired worldwide rights in December 2025, more than eight months after the film first premiered.

Along the way, It Ends picked up real festival hardware. It won Best First Feature at the Fantasia International Film Festival and the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, on top of screenings at Overlook, Chicago Critics, and Sydney. Ullom shot the entire film for roughly $80,000, wrote and directed it himself, edited it, and even appears in a small role.

What The Critics Are Saying?

Reviews out of SXSW were unambiguous. Critics called the film immensely promising, praising how its pulpy genre elements gradually reveal something more tonally surprising and dramatically complex than the setup suggests.

Multiple reviewers singled out the film’s confidence in shifting tone, moving between depressive dread and genuine attempts at levity without ever feeling random. That’s a difficult balance for any filmmaker, let alone one on a feature debut.

The consensus keeps pointing to the same thing: the horror functions as metaphor, not the entire point. Ullom has described his own approach as “hangout horror,” a phrase he says he’s been trying to coin since before the film even premiered. The underlying subject, a generation forced to confront isolation and uncertain futures, is what critics say elevates the film beyond genre exercise.

A Filmmaker Studios Are Already Betting On

The reception has done exactly what a strong festival premiere is supposed to do for an emerging filmmaker. NEON was impressed enough by Ullom’s debut that the studio signed on for his next film before It Ends even reached theaters. That film, 4 x 4: The Event, has already wrapped production.

Ullom has described it as “balls-to-the-wall gore and violence,” pitched elsewhere as Battle Royale meets Saw meets Climax. The cast alone signals how much confidence NEON has in him: Jaden Smith, Jacob Tremblay, Sophia Lillis, Dylan Minnette, and It Ends star Mitchell Cole are all attached.

That kind of momentum, a filmmaker whose debut earned genuine critical enthusiasm rather than polite festival applause, tends to translate directly into the kind of career trajectory studios pay close attention to.

What’s The Market Saying?

That critical enthusiasm has carried directly into how the industry is pricing the film’s final Rotten Tomatoes standing ahead of its wide release. The read on It Ends clearing the very highest scoring thresholds has cooled slightly in recent days, a modest pullback worth watching rather than a dramatic reversal.

The odds on it landing in truly elite territory remain real but less certain. Taken together, the current read treats It Ends as a film that has already cleared an unusually high bar with critics, and is now being watched closely to see whether that reception holds as more reviewers weigh in.

That’s exactly the kind of open question worth tracking in real time. See where the full It Ends Rotten Tomatoes market stands right now, updated live, on Kalshi.

Watch The Trailer Below:

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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