One film so far, and it tells us what Alexander Ullom does: he puts young people in a car, lets them talk, and cuts so patiently that the road itself becomes the threat. As his own editor he is exact within a scene and indulgent across them.
Fi1m perspective
Four friends in a car, headlights on a road that will not end, and nobody willing to be the first to say so. That is the image It Ends (2026) leaves behind, and it is the only image we have of Alexander Ullom. He wrote it, directed it and cut it himself, as a first feature made with friends for almost no money, and the three jobs are worth taking separately because they do not come out level.
The writer is the safest pair of hands. Ullom likes young people talking in enclosed spaces, and he has said the part of the film he loves most is the thought of "the 'Hereditary' family doing a post-game interview": the terror, and then the chat about the terror. The car talk in It Ends is his best work, funny for twenty minutes and then funny in a way nobody in the car is enjoying. Yoon, Jackson, Toth and Cole are unknowns, and he gets each of them across in a few exchanges, which is a writer's gift before it is a director's.
The director has nerve. We were frightened, properly, around the half-hour mark, by nothing more than a road carrying on when it should have stopped, and Ullom trusts that dread enough not to break it with a jump or a face at the window. He has named the Safdie brothers and Richard Linklater as influences, and both are visible: the camera that will not sit still, the conversation allowed to run past the point where most debuts would cut away.
The editor is the person this page is about, and the editor is the problem. Shot to shot Ullom is disciplined; scene to scene he is not. Past the hour the car pulls away from one encounter and the same conversation starts again, and we were bored, then cross about being bored, because the first half had earned better. The repetition is the idea. The idea does not need 89 minutes, and a version at sixty would lose nothing we would miss. A director who cuts his own film has nobody at his shoulder to tell him to stop, and It Ends shows what happens when nobody does.
He made it with the same small circle throughout, Evan Barber producing and running the floor, Carrie Carusone producing and designing, and there is a second feature, 4 X 4: The Event, in development. We would like to see it. We would like even more to see it after someone else has had the scissors for a week.
Biography
Alexander Ullom, also credited as Alex Ullom, is an American filmmaker. A native of Tampa, Florida, he graduated from the Florida State University film programme and made his feature debut with the existential horror film It Ends (2025).
Ullom wrote, directed and edited It Ends, in which he also appears in a small role as a passenger. The film premiered at South by Southwest in 2025, received a digital release later that year and a theatrical release by Neon in 2026. He has since signed with UTA and is developing a second feature, 4 X 4: The Event.
