Pop Culture Happy Hour - It Ends

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Have you ever been on a road trip that feels like it goes on forever? Did things start feeling a little getting a bit existential? That’s the whole deal with the chewy new film It Ends. The horror-meets-psychological thriller follows four friends who just graduated college, as they turn onto a road through a dense forest and the road just keeps going. Directed by Alexander Ullom, It Ends is both chill and chilling, and a lot of fun to talk about. Chasing down your next horror fix? Check out these episodes: 'Backrooms' brings YouTube horror to the big screenIn ‘Weapons’, the kids aren't at all right, not in the slightest, nopeShould you give 'Presence' the ghost of a chance?Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

So before we get to the show, and yeah, I am talking to you with your discerning and highly developed aesthetic taste in podcasts. If pop culture happy hour has ever helped you win a debate or find a favorite series before everyone else did or pretend that you saw a movie that you definitely did not see. Now, don't lie to me. We've all done it. We don't have to be proud of it. But let's be honest with each other. You and I. We owe each other that much.

Do us a favor and leave the show a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps more people find us and it helps us make the show better. Thank you. Guys, they just set out to go get food. Yeah. They set out to go get food, and what did they do to end up on the endless road? Ever been on a road trip that feels like it goes on forever? Did things start feeling a little existential?

Because that is the whole deal with a chewy new horror film. It Ends. That is a lot of fun to talk about. Four recent college graduates turn onto a road through a dense forest on the road just keeps going. Right. Their car never runs out of gas. They don't get hungry or thirsty.

And whenever they stop to stretch their legs, they find they have to get back into the car and just keep going. Are they dead? Is it aliens? Or have they stumbled upon a great big old honkin metaphor? I'm Ayesha Harris. And I'm Glenn Weldon. And joining us on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Jordan Cruciola.

She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Scene on Maximum Fun. Hey, Jordan. Hello. Thank you so much for having me back again. guys. Of course. All right, let's get to it. It ends is, help me out with this. It's a psychological thriller, horror. Sure. I mean, I don't think. Character study? Character study. Engine for existential dread is a genre, but it could be. Yeah. It is also a debut feature written and directed and edited by Alexander Ullum, and it is a doozy. The movie features four friends from high school

who have just graduated college. There is the cold analytical James, played by Phineas, U.S., There is the nerdy jokester Fisher, played by Noah Toth, the charismatic, emotionally centered day, played by Akira Jackson, and the distant ex-military guy Tyler, played by Mitchell Cole. Each of them responds to their worsening situation in very different ways, which is kind of a whole point. It ends is in theaters now. Jordan, let's kick it off with you. Now, I knew that the film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Measmo was going to be your jam. I'm less sure about this. Talk to me about it.

Yeah. If you just broken this down to me. me in its parts and even look with the tone and pacing and all, I wouldn't have been 100% sure that this was my jam either, but I ended up really getting into it. I fell into its groove. After an intro that genuinely scared me a lot and left me worried that I was going to sit, kind of having nightmares all afterwards, this is a character study piece. If you're coming in, I don't think it's a spoiler standing. It's a fair contextualizing. If you're expecting a high quotient of conventional more straightforward horror.

This isn't that movie, but I think you should stick around because I think it is well worth the literal and figurative journey that we're going on with these characters. Right. Okay. What about you, Asia? Yeah. Like, within the first 10, 15 minutes of this movie, it suggests that it might be that kind of horror movie, but then it kind of dissipates and then turns into more of a

moody, moody, very moody mood piece. I also think this is the type of movie that is. is inevitably going to get comparisons. I've already seen comparisons to backrooms. And I can see that because of this whole idea of like liminal space and just driving and driving and driving. If you were in the backrooms of the woods. Yes, exactly. Backrooms but woods.

But I would say I like this a lot more than backrooms. I think as a cinematic visual piece, it's not quite as a resting as backrooms is and the production design. But that's kind of, I think, by design because it's the woods versus. you know, being able to stack up lots of various weird cultural artifacts into rooms. Like, it's not supposed to be the same thing. As opposed to backgrounds, I think this is much more intellectually and emotionally probing, even if it doesn't necessarily reveal all that much about why exactly this is happening. Like, it's very ambiguous in a lot of ways.

And I think some people might find that dissatisfying. But I really latched on to this. I really latched on to, like, what I might do in this situation and trying to map it onto each character. And I think as we learn more about these relationships between these characters, like the first few minutes, I felt like the conversation felt like I feel like I'm watching a movie where kids, quote unquote, young people are speaking. I don't know about this dialogue. Yeah, I know what you're saying. But then once we got into this situation that they are in and we learn more about them, I think we learn just enough about how each of them are, their character

habits and it moves beyond just like ticks and obvious ways that we might think a young person might talk into something a little bit deeper and I think the performances help that. So overall, I was very pro it ends and I just found it something fun to

ponder and also really depressing to ponder as well. Yeah, I'll know with that. I think that's a sweet spot. I think that's what it's aiming for, yeah. I also thought this was great. I thought it was really smart. I thought it was well written and well acted. We have to talk more about these performances because so much of this movie is on the shoulders of these actors. I also thought,

in terms of the writing, it was remarkably restrained. I really liked that. I mean, it is very smart about the human tendency to impute everything, meaning onto places where no meaning exists and to find patterns and actually to create patterns out of pure nothingness and invest that with meaning that we create and then to take it even further and to assume in a very narcissistic way that whatever a bad thing happens. That is the universe. That is God or whatever. That is taking a personal interest in you and wanting to punish you or to teach you to center yourself in that extreme way is a very, very human thing. It's also incredibly arrogant. And it's very young, too, in a way, which is also, this is where it kind of overlaps with horror movie stuff. Jordan, we've talked about this many

times. One of the reasons I've historically shied away from certain kinds of horror slash or horror in particular is because there's always this moralistic, not always, there's often a moralistic component. of normativeness and, you know, when kids have sex, they get punished. That's a component of a lot of horror, especially early slasher films. Someone transgresses they get punished. So when these kids start assuming that they're getting punished, they're a lot like the horror film characters they are. The difference is, instead of just letting it happen to them, they really try to start figuring stuff out. That's my favorite thing about this movie, is that they hypothesize.

And then they test that hypothesis. They also do things like they establish routines because they know that we need routines. They waste time on memes even though there's just four of them in that car. And in this dialogue you mentioned Aisha, which is there for a reason. This is the kind of banal, meaningless, extremely online conversations that exist only to get people engaging with each other. And that's what the movie is about. At the end of the day, life is about passing the damn time with other people. So, you know, it ends up being kind of like no exit or, you know, no.

exits and no off ramps and no rest stops, if Sart was maybe 23% cheered up or at least had accepted a lot in life, there's a negotiation that these characters make with this situation that is what the film's all about. And I really like that. Yeah, I found myself wondering, I think these are people who are supposed to be just out of college or like around college age. Yeah, they're packing up and moving out of college. Exactly. A friend has come to get them. And they just They set out to go get food. Yeah. They set out to go get food and what do they do to end up on the endless road?

Who knows? But like the fact that they're that age, so assuming it's set around the present day, you know, that makes them squarely Gen Z. And I found it really fascinating to think about how so much of what we think of not just Gen Z, but like my generation of millennials is that we can't stay off of our phone. Well, really everyone now. Like we can't stay off of our phones. And the fact that there is no internet.

And all they can do is go through everything. that's offline on their phone. It's kind of like, you know, before we were able to get Wi-Fi on planes. Like, what do you do with yourself for however long you're on the plane? And I found it really fascinating to see, like, I think the easy way to go would be to sort of like graph onto these young Gen Z kids, like this existential crisis that is about like being undone by being unplugged in a way. And it doesn't go straight for that. It's not so obvious in that way. I don't think it's trying to graph onto this like a generational narrative, even though there are bits of that here and there. And I think that kind of makes it work better for me because, again, the easy way would be to say like, this is a story about being Gen Z and not having Internet.

But like it's less about that and more about like at one point a character says, you know, like I just realized I barely have any photos of my family in here. And it's like that kind of gutted me. I was like, oh man, yeah, sometimes I look down and I'm like, I only have pictures of my dogs. but they have like memes and stuff. So it's both deep but not deep and I think it toes that line really, really well for me, which is why I liked it so much. What you were saying, Glenn, like the restraint, the script, I found to be really satisfying over the course of the runtime of this movie because

I'm part of kind of a situation like this is it's like, unless you're checking off day by day by day, how long have we been out here? How long have we been doing this? How long has this been going on? And I thought the movie really elegantly handled. something that could have been really ham-fisted, like, the passage of time. So you, too, are left disoriented in what the actual framework of this place that they're in is. Like, nobody screams at somebody at some point, like, listen, it's been 792 days.

Nobody does that. And it feels like that's really easy impulse. And I feel like a sort of low-hanging fruit would be at some point somebody starts trying to, like, kill people. They're, like, clawing their own skin off. And this movie's not trying to really go over the time. It really is just like, hey, let's take kind of a, like, smoking in your dorm room conversation. But do it in this way that is surprisingly intelligent and surprisingly dynamic considering you're in the same, like, repetitive stretch of wooded road. God, I want to talk to the director about how many times they set up, okay, back here, okay, turn it around.

Like, just like back to one that saved a chunk of road to be on. on and like the ways in which we see how other people have interacted with this world, the artifacts that they have left behind and what that lets us know about how other people have handled, succeeded or failed within this environment without really talking you through it. It's really hard not to do that. And shouts out to the producers who made this movie because committing to that after just seeing this as a script, you got to have the faith of the imagination and the creative to carry this through in a way that is going to be intelligent and resonant and engaging.

aging, and they really pull it off. Yeah. The tone of this, the calls are clearly coming from inside the house. This is made by a young filmmaker. It's about young people, and it doesn't feel like it's a writer's room of 48-year-old people saying. This does not feel like avocado toasts the movie. Let's put a Terminator reference in here because that's what the kids are watching. That early dialogue makes you think, we're going to get a lecture about how these kids should, these kids should just stop using DoorDash, whatever. Like, you know, just just. But also, the other thing is that this movie, to your point, Jordan, it's working with its hands tied behind

its back and it still succeeds. These characters, don't need to eat sleep or poop. The men don't grow facial hair. So there are absolutely no visual or physical signifiers of time passing. They don't have a change of clothes, really. They got like some extra stuff in there because they were just going to get some food. Exactly. But time passing is what this entire movie is about.

And we, the audience, have to feel that or else this movie is dead on its feet. So all of that work gets shunted into the performances and the dialogue too. but these are actors who have to convey a kind of weariness that is purely mental, psychological, emotional, spiritual, not physical, but we have to feel it in our chests. It also has a great sense of itself structurally because it kind of neatly defies what's called the memetic fallacy, which is where you're watching characters who are bored, that's great. But if we're bored watching them, dead. Movies dead. As soon as you start to feel that fatigue, something new is introduced to complicate, to intrigue. ultimately to frustrate, but that's part of the deal.

I also like that it knows what it has to do. You mentioned this, both of you mentioned this in different ways, but you're busting out this giant metaphor, this big honkin central metaphor that is so on the nose, you cannot have your characters keep pointing to it. You have to leave it up to the audience to do. We're going to do it. It's kind of inescapable. It's an elephant. But you can't ever pull back and have your characters comment on it because that kills it. I know there are going to be critics and viewers out there who really delight in, you know, saying, oh, I identified this trope, therefore it's a cliche, therefore I'm smarter than the movie, therefore this feels overdone, it's ham-fisted, or because you're dealing with this giant metaphor, it's pretentious, right?

I know that that's going to be some criticism in this movie. I would push back on that because this film does a lot of work to keep things inside that car. This movie does such a good job not being pretentious. I got to underscore it. It's amazing. This movie feels like it would be stuck in it. its own head. It's really not. Yeah. Right. These characters are types, but they're specific enough that you feel like they have lives. There are several moments, and I took a checkmark each

time one came, that there was a beat, and you're like, you're waiting for the pullback. You're waiting for the grand statement, the thesis. But we never get it because these characters are behaving according to their characters not to, they're not behaving because of what they represent as characters. And I thought that was such a big deal. Yeah. Well, we've got more to talk about. We'll be right back after this break. Welcome back. Aisha, let's pick up with you. I feel like this whole exercise feels very

like Rod Serling-esque in a way. I think we've already mentioned, but like, it's not really we're marking time here. I think we will know when the first 24 hours have gone by. But like then after that, everything is marked in terms of like miles and like how far they've driven. And again, the car just keeps going.

Like it doesn't run out of it. It's at a quarter tank from the beginning to the end. Yeah. Just like Vin Diesel live in life. a quarter mile at a time. And what I love about that is like there's just like a weariness to them and a acceptance to some extent of like what they're going through. That feels very familiar and very like if we wanted to try and graph more metaphor onto it, it's like, yes, like are we as a society so used to the chaos of the world at this point

that like we're just all resigned to it in a way. But that resignation, it's not just resignation though. There is this like push to, at least for what. one character to like just keep trying to figure out why this is happening to them and like trying to crack a code. But then it's like, is this off futile? Probably. Like, what is the meaning of life? I don't know. Is the journey the destination? There we go. That's what it is. And I mean, we've danced around the idea of these performances, but I really do think that there's just something about the way that they're able to keep the boredom. The boredom is part of that,

but it doesn't make us bored. I think that's because as we reveal how each of them react to these situations. We also get like just enough hint of like what their relationships were like before and like in the normal times, in the before times. And, you know, there are some people who are going to be like, I needed more. Like I wanted more. This is not enough. This feels sparse or underdeveloped. But I don't think like if you've been friends with these other three people for so long, you're not going to have all that information. And again, we're in a very specific situation here where it's like, what is there to talk about? Like, we're not going to keep rehashing the past or whatever. And for me, at least, there's not too much exposition.

There's, like, just enough. And as those things reveal themselves, like, all the little things about, like, what they can do and them trying to figure out what's happening in the beginning. I don't know. It's just the ending, I was kind of like, ah, but then I was like, ah, I kind of like, it worked for me. I'm not the kind of person for whom that kind of thing would normally work for, but the way they threaded the needle leading up to that point, it did, it worked. And it felt in lying with how we had come to know these people. And again, to the point of the performances, we keep like dotting these in because I feel like the movie's just so fluid. Like, nobody's really being like the standout soprano here to like take from everybody else. They all

work so well in concert with one another. And they felt super lived in. By the time we really settle in with them, I believed that these were just people in a car who'd known each other forever. I believed their lives had started before this movie began. And I believe that their lives in some fashion went on after it ended again in some fashion. And like, you know, what you were saying, Glenn about the memes, like the point where there like two of them in the car trading back and forth like sort of jokes about like me on the endless road. It was like that felt so real right there. And there were, it was great across the board and performances, but it was so impressive in these just tiny naturalistic flourishes where it really felt like these people were in the

pocket, in the impossible constraint of the cab of this car. And also just the tidiness of that great intro you had about the road tripping, I was like, man, this would be my I-5 Central Valley corridor. Like, there is a relatable aspect. Everybody has a piece of road where they're like, man, if I was on an endless road,

this would probably be the one that I was trapped in for eternity. So, like, that just felt like a very like, ah, the universal experience of everyone's got that endless road, too, which is just very, had me panicking. God, what if I was stuck in the I-5 Central Central Valley corridor for this long?

So, yeah. So let me toss this out, see what you think of it. This is certainly a metaphor for life, for postgraduate life. It's also, I would say, a COVID metaphor. Fair, fair. We had our first wave of filmmakers grappling with the pandemic during the pandemic. So there were some remote distancing horror movies like host, like the literal situation they're dealing with. But now I think what's happening is that filmmakers have had time to process that experience and they're reflecting it back on us.

At these kind of weird angles, we just had the last house, which is a bunch of folks trapped in a house. Now this, they're trapped in a car. They're trying to get through it. I mean, I think we need some more examples here, but I think there's something bubbling up here, no? I mean, I definitely thought about COVID while watching this because, again, I kept thinking, okay, these are people assuming that this is set in the present day, our current present day, they have lived through COVID already, which, again, the movie does not make any sort of direct connections to that. But my brain went, oh, well, it kind of makes sense that they would actually maybe be not okay. necessarily. Equipped for this. Equipped. Like, and also, again, that weariness that settles in after however many

thousand miles, like, I can't imagine going through COVID without having internet access. Now, that sounds like, wow. But still, those of us who are still here, we've made it through. We've made it on the other side. And so it's hard for me not to think that this movie in some ways is pulling from that. And also just these ideas about, like, why us, like, why are we dealing like is this punishment, is this purgatory, like, are we dead? Like all these questions, like, why us? Glenn, as you said earlier, like, it's as if like some God decided to punish you. It's like, no, this is just what's happening.

And I think that's all simmering below the surface here for sure. Like, I don't think you can have gone through COVID and not get a little bit of that sense of like, it seemed like at a certain point, like, for a lot of us, this might never end. And we might be locked inside forever. And of course, that's not the case. but that's what it feels like in this movie, I think, really kind of at least put me back in that space to some extent. I think the posing of the question and the ability to play with it, I think is such an exciting testament to, like, that reality of like the movie that you make and then the world that your movie arrives.

And inevitably, this filmmaker and these actors were formed in some way, whatever the specifics are, who knows, by the lockdowns, COVID, the pandemic. And there have been bottle movies in the past. There have been endless loop. But, however, those movies didn't arrive in a time where we could sit there and ask, like, wow, as people who were trapped in their homes, I'm wondering, is this going to ever end? And do I die here? And what if we have already told all the stories and there are no new memories? Like, in the throes of, like, perhaps some people who are very adherent to the restrictions around lockdown being like, where will I ever have a new experience ever again? I hadn't honestly thought about it at all while I was watching it.

And now you're saying it's like, yeah, this person has a very immediate reference in their life for like, maybe they missed a graduation and were stuck in a cube during this time. And like, how on earth wouldn't you think if you were a filmmaker at least of making a movie about that? You didn't follow through on it maybe. But I feel like every director out there perhaps like in this kind of age range is probably like, I could make a movie about being stuck inside. Yeah. Like the notion, too, of like a movie, like, a movie, like, a movie.

like this encapsulating in Amber, what we're still dealing with when we just go on about our lives every day in their normal comings and going, be like, hey, guys, remember that really bad thing that happened to literally everyone? I mean, what an unbelievable social reference to have in our existence. Yeah. Amazing. Wow. We talked about how filmmakers, how creators were going to grapple with COVID on this show. And I used to you said something very smart about how, like, somebody's going to be walking down the street in a scene. They're going to see a mask on the street. this is so much a more interesting way to do that.

This is just to come at this, at this oblique angle, and yet to stoke those memories, and then to do something with it, not just to point out and say, remember that, but to kind of say, we got through it and we got through it together. Yeah. And ultimately, that's all that is. It's the complete opposite of Edenton. Thank goodness. Yeah. Thank goodness. That was kind of what I felt watching Edna.

It was like, wow, are we still living in that movie? Because we kind of are. And then watching this, it's like how many people feel like they're still in the in-between place? How many people feel like something was taken from them where they're still stuck in the middle? Like something didn't restart. They were shoved off their track and, like, haven't found their way back on. It was just like, there's a quiet harrowingness about that.

And this just did it in the most, like, soft way. Yeah. That is really admirable and really, I hate this as a, like, a review of anything. but so human. Yeah. It was so human. Yeah. No, I mean, there's no way that something that catastrophic, we can just kind of put that

behind. And I think that this movie acknowledges that. And it also acknowledges that, like, there are some things which have answers or have logic to them or things that you can try to make sense of. And then there are other things where it's just like, you just got to go with it. You just have to let it happen. And you can try and make yourself more comfortable or try to adapt to it. And that is the way humans can work.

But also, like, try and just search for meaning in it. You're not going to be satisfied. Right. Unless you just love the pursuit of that. Like, maybe be satisfied in the pursuit. Yes. Because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, tough to find. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. This movie lives in that. And I like that it lives in that messiness. Yeah. And we are all recommending this film. Yeah. And listeners, if you haven't seen it and it sounds bleak and depressing, I'm going to tell you it's not. It's not.

Because it's about getting through it. at the end of the day. Yeah. And it's a chewy conversation about a very chewing movie, and y'all should check it out. That brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Currishioly, Aisha Harris.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Put me in the endless road with the roundtable of PCHH, guys, and I will be stimulated forever. And joining us on that endless road is who produced this episode, Lenin Sherburn,

Hops ofatham, and Mike Katzif. It was edited by our executive producer Barton Gurdwood. Our showruner is Jessica ready, she's here too, and hello, come in, provides our theme music there. What's on the radio. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.