Being trapped is a reliable premise in horror films and psychological thrillers, with good reason. It’s a primal fear, the type of situation that strikes right into our animal brain. And it has become an apt metaphor, representing the fears and traumas of a younger generation who has surged back into theaters this year to see its own anxieties reflected.
The Terrors of Monotony
Familiarity is usually synonymous with safety. What’s more comforting than a routine? But being trapped within familiar environs is a totally different situation. Suddenly the familiar becomes threatening, as in “It Ends,” the sharp directorial debut of Alexander Ullom.
There’s an art to depicting monotony as a vehicle of terror without having the film itself lag in pacing or suspense. The plot of “It Ends” is simple — four friends, recent college graduates, find themselves stuck on an endless road. The first part of the film reads as horror: panic sparks when the driver realizes that the view outside is just the same moving backdrop, passing trees along the road, never changing. And when they stop the car, hordes of people — young ones, mirroring the main characters — erupt from the woods, screaming and rushing the vehicle like a scene from a zombie flick. But the forest-dwellers are only a temporary threat. The movie hits its stride and takes a more novel approach to terror when its protagonists settle into the monotony of endless driving, which transforms their car from a temporary space to get them from Point A to Point B to instead their whole world.
The climbing numbers of the odometer, marker scribbles on the inner car doors and windows: Everywhere we see evidence of the ceaseless rituals of their days, and the tension becomes more about how the friends adjust to the brain-deadening monotony. Their initial horror eventually shifts to frustration and finally apathy. Their ultimate indifference to their situation is the most unnerving psychological terror.
Some of the sense of dread “It Ends” captures so clearly recalls the anxieties we faced in quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic. (In fact, the film’s director was a senior in college the year the pandemic started.) That terror is echoed — somewhat on the nose — in “The Last House,” a recent Netflix film that follows a family’s struggle to survive in a world in which everyone gets trapped in their homes. The protagonists witness their elderly neighbors die during the catastrophe, and the children are forced to develop in isolation. The home, and their daily household habits, like the daily car routines the young people adopt in “It Ends,” keeps them safe and relatively sane, at least for a while. But after they’ve been stuck for years, those surroundings become a suffocating world unto itself.
Monotony is also an indicator of something horrifically wrong in “Exit 8,” a blockbuster in Japan before opening in the United States earlier this year. The main character, known simply as the Lost Man, hurries several times through an infinitely looping subway corridor. He doesn’t even notice the repetition at first. The film offers a neat parable of how many of us may live our lives on autopilot, sticking to the same schedules and patterns to create days that fall into an endless lull. But, as the Lost Man discovers, there’s danger in going through life with one’s head down: Those who can’t see the monotony risk being forever trapped in it.
Existential Stasis
Generally when characters are stuck in a physical space in movies, it doesn’t exactly take a stretch of the imagination to assume they were feeling trapped psychologically or emotionally.
The 20-somethings in “It Ends” are in a transitional phase: They’re trying to cross into adulthood and figure out the rest of their lives. But as they first get on the road together and discuss their plans for the future, it’s clear they’re less than thrilled about what awaits them. The most cynical one of the group, who has mapped out his entire life from that very moment, seems lost in a kind of existential malaise. Another reveals that she recently attempted suicide. These friends were lost and listless long before they’d stepped into the car. But if the reality these young graduates have grown up in at all resembles ours, then they’ve been raised in a world teeming with anxieties, one of pandemics, A.I. and climate change — of course, then, they may think the future is bleak. Their journey becomes a countdown to determining how long a lost generation can tolerate staying lost.
A similar theme plays out in “Backrooms,” a breakout hit from this year that has become something of a definitive Gen Z text. Clark, the furniture store ownerwho finds the eerie labyrinth , is in a rough place when he discovers that hidden liminal space. He’s an alcoholic who’s still hung up on his failed marriage. And his always-empty furniture store isn’t faring much better. And for as much as Clark is stalled at this point in his life, the “monster” he encounters in the backrooms represents a version of him who continues to be displaced in his own existence: He’s the embodiment of Clark’s existential stasis and his lingering resentment about the life he’s living.
An Ambiguous Ending
To the extent that these films may be influenced by the literal quarantines or the psychological trauma of the pandemic, there’s no real solution because there’s no concrete antagonist to defeat.
Instead, most of these films conclude with their characters either overtaken by their circumstances or resolved to soldier on like Sisyphus accepting his fate. “Backrooms” ends with the suggestion that people will continue to explore the space, though what will happen to those people and those backrooms is left a mystery. “Exit 8” also ends on a kind of reset, where the Lost Man seems to have escaped only to return to the same initial setting in which we first encountered him. It suggests that he has an opportunity to change his circumstances, but if he chooses inaction again there’s a chance he’ll return to that same liminal space where he was trapped before.
“It Ends” is a bit more optimistic. When James, the final passenger in the cursed car, reaches the end of the road to find nothing but abandoned vehicles and a sign that just reads “Road Ends,” he seems broken by this revelation at first. But he gets back into the car, turns around, and heads back down the road, this time dragging one of the languid characters from the side of the road along with him in the passenger seat. James’ new passenger seems to gradually get revived, and while the movie isn’t providing a happy ending or concrete resolution, it suggests that, at the very least, there is some power in enduring.
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