IT ENDS

 You cannot do what you want, and yet you are responsible for what you are. 

Jean-Paul Sartre 

A film that uses genre as a device for concealment. 

Apparently a horror film, it is in fact an existential drama that adopts the guise of the genre in order to evade its conventions and examine a radical question: what does it mean to live when there is no guarantee that existence has any meaning? Here, horror does not lie in the irruption of the supernatural, but in the possibility that the supernatural is nothing more than a literal representation of our condition. 

Four young people, a road that never ends, a car moving forward without ever reaching a destination. The simplicity of the premise is inversely proportional to the film’s conceptual density. The journey becomes a figure for existence, while its reiteration translates into cinematic form one of life’s most familiar experiences and, precisely for that reason, one of the least recognised: repetition. We delude ourselves into believing that we are moving through a succession of different events, accumulating experiences, advancing towards something; and yet our days, gestures, behaviours and even choices tend to reproduce recurring patterns. Circumstances, objects and people change; the logic that organises our way of being in the world does not necessarily change with them. 

It is precisely in its form that It Ends finds one of its most successful insights. Repetition is not merely what the film recounts, but what it makes the viewer experience. The narrative loop is not a device for artificially prolonging suspense: it is the structural translation of an existential condition. Movement continues, but produces no recognisable progress; experience accumulates without necessarily turning into knowledge; time passes without the passage of time guaranteeing evolution. The road is not simply endless: it is a mechanism that reproduces itself, as an existence can when habit has replaced awareness. 

In Pleasantville, it is impossible to imagine that anything exists beyond the known world; in It Ends, it is impossible to see where the world one is travelling through is leading. In the first film, repetition is a reassuring order that prevents thought; in the second, it becomes an endless movement that guarantees no progress. 

The decisive question, however, is not repetition as such. It is the difference between repetition accompanied by thought and repetition deprived of it. Not every reiteration is necessarily sterile: we can return to the same gestures, retrace similar experiences, even make mistakes we have made before, provided there remains the possibility of recognising what we are doing, questioning its reasons, and transforming experience into material for reflection. Repetition can belong to a conscious project, or it can be reduced to the automatic reproduction of a mechanism whose nature we no longer understand. The difference does not lie in the apparent variety of events, but in the quality of the relationship we establish with them. 

This is where the figures emerging from the forest take on a meaning far more radical than their horror-film function would suggest. They are not simply individuals defeated by exhaustion, desperate creatures or victims of a condition from which they cannot escape. Rather, they represent a form of existence in which the very possibility of asking questions seems to have been exhausted. What characterises them is not so much resignation as what precedes it: the absence of a conscious choice, an inquiry, a form of thought capable of transforming an imposed condition into a problem to be examined. They have not necessarily searched for an answer and failed to find one; they seem unable even to recognise the need to search. But this will only become clear at the end… 

Their passivity is more radical than despair, because despair presupposes at least the perception of a rupture, an awareness that something does not correspond to expectations. Here, instead, the risk is that of an existence reduced to its biological and reactive dimension: living, consuming, responding to stimuli, reproducing behaviours, without life itself becoming an object of inquiry. This condition cannot be separated from the social structures that sustain it, from mechanisms of conditioning, propaganda, incessant communication and the attention economy, all capable of occupying every available space without necessarily expanding consciousness. Individuals can be constantly stimulated and, precisely for that reason, become increasingly less inclined to think. They can be active without being autonomous, informed without being aware, immersed in movement without knowing where they are going. 

From this perspective, the film intersects with Adorno’s critique of administered society and the heteronomy of thought: the problem is not merely subordination to an external power, but the progressive naturalisation of the mechanisms that organise our experience, until they become invisible. When we can no longer recognise our own condition as something that can be questioned, the world ceases to appear as a problem and presents itself as an inevitable given. The road becomes the only possible world, not because it has been chosen, but because we can no longer conceive of it as something that might be thought differently. 

This is precisely where It Ends moves away from a simply pessimistic reading. The endless road represents not only a sentence to a journey without a destination, but also the possibility of continuing to question what cannot be definitively resolved. The film thus enters the territory of the Camusian absurd, that of The Myth of Sisyphus, where the human demand for meaning encounters the silence of the world. The absurd is neither a property of the world considered in isolation nor merely an individual feeling: it arises from their relationship, from the disproportion between our need for intelligibility and the absence of an ultimate answer. 

Recognising this disproportion does not mean concluding that life is useless. On the contrary, it means freeing life from the need to be justified by a transcendent truth, a final destination or a promise of compensation. There is no need to postulate another world, reincarnation or a higher order in which present contradictions will finally find their resolution. The search is not a provisional interval preceding the possession of truth: it is the permanent condition of a form of thought that refuses to stop questioning existence precisely because it cannot exhaust it. 

It is in this sense that Ullom’s road can be associated with Nietzsche. The critique of absolute truth, understood as a human construction whose nature has been forgotten, does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of thought. If the guarantee of an ultimate foundation disappears, the possibility of knowing, interpreting and questioning does not thereby disappear. Truth is not a definitive possession that brings the search to a close, but a horizon subject to the continuous revision of our perspectives. The risk lies not in failing to find a conclusive answer, but in claiming that, in the absence of such an answer, questioning is no longer worthwhile. 

Nietzsche’s affirmation of life is situated precisely within this fracture. It is not the optimism of someone who assumes that everything will lead to a favourable outcome, nor the consolation of someone who assigns suffering a necessary meaning. It is the affirmation of existence without the precondition that it must prove itself to possess an ultimate meaning. Life does not need to be redeemed by some further explanation in order to be lived. The journey does not necessarily have to culminate in a truth capable of retrospectively justifying it. 

Suffering, too, which the film evokes as a possible locus of meaning, must be freed from every consolatory temptation. It is not pain that gives existence value, as though suffering were a necessary trial or a form of elevation. What matters is the possibility of thinking about what one experiences, of not merely enduring it, of transforming experience into inquiry—and this is evident in James’s journey. 

Suffering does not answer the question of meaning: at most, it can make the question unavoidable. To confuse these two things would mean turning the absurd into a new justification, replacing the promise of future happiness with the claim that present pain must have a reason. 

The endless road is therefore also a negation of a teleological conception of existence, according to which every journey would acquire value only in relation to its conclusion. If meaning is located exclusively at the end, the present becomes a means, a period of waiting, a sacrifice to be endured in anticipation of something that does not yet exist. But if that ending is not guaranteed, the entire structure of justification risks collapsing. What remains, then, is the possibility of recognising value in the journey without turning it into a means of reaching something else: not because every experience is automatically meaningful, but because meaning is not necessarily a property already assigned to things. It can emerge from the way we live them, think about them and bring them into relation with one another. 

An equally significant historical dimension overlaps with this existential one. The road is unsettling not only because it seems endless, but because it offers no view of the future. The problem is not simply the fear of growing up, nor the uncertainty typical of a transitional phase: it is the fear of entering a world in which the future has progressively ceased to appear as a promise. Rather than constituting the horizon towards which desires and projects are directed, the future takes on the contours of a threat. 

Modernity has fostered, despite its contradictions and inequalities, the idea that time could translate into progress, that tomorrow might offer better conditions than those of the present. Today, this promise appears increasingly implausible. We continue to move forward, but movement no longer guarantees direction; incessant transformations take place without any shared improvement being discernible in them. The road in It Ends thus becomes an image of a contemporary world in which acceleration does not coincide with progress and the multiplication of possibilities does not guarantee a greater capacity to choose. The horizon is not merely distant: it seems to have slipped beyond our ability to imagine it. 

This is the tension running through the film: on the one hand, existence as repetition, exposure to the absurd, the impossibility of reaching a definitive truth; on the other, the possibility that awareness can transform our relationship with what repeats itself. The point is not to naively oppose individual freedom to a collective condition, nor to claim that thinking is enough to escape every constraint. It is to recognise that passivity is not the only possible relationship with the world, and that the absence of guarantees does not necessarily mean the absence of possibilities. 

The ending, in its attempt to open up a glimmer of hope, therefore remains a delicate point. The narrative conclusion may give the impression that the road can finally be overcome, but its philosophical force lies elsewhere: in the possibility that the journey can be experienced differently once we stop demanding that it provide a definitive solution. If the ending were merely the reward granted to those who persevered, the film would fall back into the consolatory logic it seems to question. If, instead, the limit became an opportunity to change one’s relationship with the search, the conclusion would not erase the absurd: it would reveal one possible way of moving through it. 

Ultimately, It Ends is a film about the risk of living without thinking and the possibility of thinking without expecting to arrive. Its road is not merely a metaphor for life, but the representation of a question that cannot be definitively put aside: what remains of existence when we stop believing that it must lead to a truth capable of justifying it? The people in the forest embody the danger of a life that has abandoned not so much an answer as the question itself. The protagonist, by contrast, remains within the journey, exposed to its repetition and opacity, without movement guaranteeing him a destination. 

The ultimate distinction is not between those who arrive and those who do not, between those who win and those who succumb. It is between those who regard the absence of an answer as a reason to abandon the search and those who recognise that very absence as the condition that makes the search necessary. 

Perhaps this is the film’s most radical meaning: not to find a reason to live that frees us from the absurd, but not to allow the absurd to become a reason to stop living consciously. 

If the road does not lead to a conclusive revelation, what remains is not merely the teleological drive towards a destination, but the circularity of the journey itself: a temporality opposed to the eschatological vision, which imagines history as oriented towards an end and redemption. The return of one of the protagonists does not necessarily represent defeat or the abandonment of the search. On the contrary, it may indicate that there is no elsewhere capable of resolving the enigma of existence: one returns to where one began, but is no longer quite the same. The road has delivered no truth; it has made it impossible to stop searching for one. And perhaps it is precisely in this circularity, devoid of a definitive conclusion but not therefore devoid of meaning, that the film finds its most radical answer. 

The road does not necessarily have to lead somewhere. It is enough not to stop asking what it means to travel along it. 

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. 

Søren Kierkegaard