This Friday, one of the year's best-reviewed horror debuts finally goes nationwide. NEON released the final trailer for It Ends this week, ahead of the film's nationwide expansion on August 28th, following a buzzy limited run in New York and Los Angeles that posted the best per-screen average of its opening week on just five screens.
The premise is both straightforward and horrifying: Four recent college graduates head out on a late-night food run and turn onto a two-lane highway that never ends. Outside the car waits a murderous mob. Inside it, they don't get hungry, they don't get tired, and the gas needle never moves. Hell? Another dimension? A road to nowhere? The movie keeps you guessing!
Horror has always loved a good trap, from Open Water to Buried, and an endless highway might be the purest version of the idea yet: the characters can drive as fast as they want and still go nowhere.
The film premiered at SXSW back in March 2025, meaning NEON spent over a year building this rollout, then won Best First Feature at Fantasia and played Sitges and Overlook on its way to a 92% critics score across nearly 90 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus there credits its "magnetic young ensemble and mounting sense of dread" for twisting "a perpetual road trip into an existential nightmare," and The Atlantic's David Sims praised how it evokes "the creepiness of a bad dream, the kind that begins in the middle of the story and seems just off."
This is Director Alexander Ullom's feature debut, at the age of 28, and he shot it for a reported $80,000. The Tampa native started out studying computer science before pivoting to film, and Variety is already running profiles asking whether he's the next great horror director.
A five-figure budget landing a NEON deal and a nationwide release is rare, but it's a path that NEON knows well. The distributor rode Longlegs past $100 million in 2024 on a similarly unhinged campaign. Ullom already has a follow-up brewing called 4x4: The Event, which he has described as balls-to-the-wall gore and violence.
Tyler, Day, Fisher, and James are played by Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon, an unknown young cast, which only helps the trapped-with-strangers energy the trailer pushes.
Salon praised the film's "swift 89-minute runtime and purposeful plotting," and Diaspora's Dino-Ray Ramos called it "an elevated B-movie, drenched in anxiety, depression, desperation, and sometimes unexpected humor."
NEON has been marketing this thing with appropriate madness. The limited opening included a 36-hour endurance-challenge marathon at a New York cinema, where the film looped continuously with a cash prize for audience members who lasted, and director Q&A screenings ran all weekend at the IFC Center. The stunt even paid at the register, accounting for roughly $25,000 of the limited opening's gross, and select showings this weekend add a director's-commentary track for the expansion.
Fair warning on the audience split: while critics sit at 92%, the audience score is a much choppier 46%, which usually signals a slow-burn, ambiguity-forward horror movie. If you need your mysteries solved by the credits, this one may frustrate you. If you love a film that trusts you to sit in the dread, it was built for you.
It Ends opens nationwide this Friday, August 28th, and the weekend's wide-release competition is thin, which gives an $80,000 movie a genuine shot at a top-five debut.
Will you be taking the drive this weekend, or waiting for streaming where the exits still work?
Tell us in the comments!