It Ends

For this Opening Night screening, audiences may purchase a film-only ticket at standard price or a ticket that includes access to our Opening Night reception for $25; $22 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC Members. Post-screening reception will include small bites, wine, beer, and cocktails generously provided by Superbird Tequila.

Please note: All-Access Pass holders receive access to the film and reception. Reception tickets are excluded from the 3+ Film Package.

Tampa-born writer-director Alexander Ullom, named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2024, coined the term “hangout horror” to describe his perversely entertaining and sneakily profound feature debut, which opens on four friends in their early twenties (Mitchell Cole, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon), newly graduated and piled together in someone’s Jeep Cherokee, zooming down a lushly wooded parkway on a low-key snack run. When the awaited turn-off never materializes, the young adults find themselves trapped on a metaphysically perplexing, seemingly endless road—one from which they can’t escape, as they soon discover that stopping the car invariably attracts the attention of what lurks in the forest… Ullom elicits uniformly winning performances from the four leads, and his own immense talent for writing dialogue is on full display, establishing an easy intimacy with his characters through their approachable, lived-in banter, and inviting the viewer into their idiosyncratic friend-group dynamic—all while embracing the full allegorical potential of the ingeniously existential thought experiment that drives the story to its promised, if inconceivable, conclusion.

CCAP available.