Car Troubles and Hellish Roads in It Ends and Desert Road
Two directorial debuts at this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival share an existential synergy in offering terrifying variations on the road trip movie.
Alexander Ullom’s It Ends follows four recent college grads, James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson) who embark on a late-night drive together before they go their separate ways. While en route they realize that they’re on a never-ending road and any time they try to pause to catch their breath, they have only ninety seconds of respite before hordes of screaming people literally come out of the woodwork to swarm them. They wrestle with whether or not to accept their Sisyphean reality or find a way to escape their vehicular purgatory. A similar affliction befalls the unnamed woman (Kristine Froseth) at the heart of Shannon Triplett’s Desert Road. After stopping to fill up her tank at a gas station in the desert, the woman’s car tire blows out and she doubles back to get help, only to end up at the same gas station and car. As night sets in, she too realizes she’s caught in a loop, with no exit route in sight.
Though not explicitly named, the eternal road in both projects represents the terror and violence of having to transition into a type of adulthood characterized by repetitive and monotonous rhythms, broken only by numbing coping mechanisms. The ways It Ends and Desert Road revel in their horrors at different tempos speak to the various ways youth today have to contend with the messiness of growing up. Froseth’s character’s realization of her time loop predicament is a measured crescendo into fear, encapsulating that gnawing, slow-burn terror of realizing that, as we get older, we have fewer options in our lives. Ullom’s instantaneous immersion in the road’s horrors represents the ways young people often have to grow up at an expedited rate in harsh conditions.
What remains striking about both projects is the way Triplett and Ullom frame their characters’ rage against their crises as an act of righteous indignation. There’s seemingly no end to the horrors that greet those coming of age in a world marked by political unrest, late-stage capitalism, and environmental degradation, and It Ends and Desert Road portray their characters’ cognizance of (and pushback against) their newfound and hellish circumstances as an almost holy act of disruption.
There’s a difference between acceptance and resignation, and none of the characters in these films are willing to trust in cruise control when it comes to the state of the world. The thrill of both films comes from witnessing the ways their heroes try to make sense of their realities and do everything in their power to fight against the inexplicable structures in which they find themselves. Without spoiling either It Ends or Desert Road, while all the characters arrive at various forms of deference to their fate on their respective roads, this is not an indifferent compliance. I view their final destinations as less of an endorsement of the systems that caused this angst, but an acknowledgment that, to fix anything, one has to first confront the reality that it is broken. The road to such transformation is arduous and painful, but it begins with this hallowed fury.
Zachary Lee is from Chicago’s North Side. A 2023 Chicago Film Critics Association & Rotten Tomatoes Emerging Critics Program Grant Recipient, he is a freelance culture writer who often writes about media, faith, technology and the environment. His words can be found at RogerEbert.com, Letterboxd, Interview Magazine, Inverse, and Dread Central. You can find him on X and Letterboxd.
