The SXSW Film Festival launched on Friday night with a star-studded premiere of the new Amazon Prime Video sequel “Another Simple Favor,” followed by the highly anticipated launch of Apple TV+’s “The Studio” at the Paramount and Babak Anvari’s “Hallow Road” across town. Of course, these red-carpet events weren’t alone, as SXSW starts with a bang, programming more films on day one than most fests, which often ease people into the fest experience. There’s no easing here. After all, it’s Texas.
The best of the three narrative films not mentioned in the paragraph above that I’ve seen from day one of SXSW, by some stretch, is Alexander Ullom’s clever “It Ends,” an unexpected hybrid of the hangout comedy with what could be called road horror. It’s not quite as chill as the former or as harrowing as the latter, but “Dazed and Confused” meets “The Hitcher” isn’t entirely inaccurate. Anchored by four genuinely engaging performances and a concept that understands the benefit of not overexplaining itself, “It Ends” could be a modest arthouse hit for the studio that ends up releasing it.
Four friends are at that turning point of life when you can almost feel yourself pulling away from your group, going down different roads. Tyler (Mitchell Cole) seems like an average blue-collar guy, speaking proudly of the work he’s doing at an HVAC company, while James (Phinehas Yoon) has the air of a young man who may have outgrown his friend group from college, about to take the white-collar desk job route to 2.5 kids, a dog, and a picket fence. Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) seem more adrift, the people who may have graduated college but that doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing with the rest of their lives.
All four of these well-sketched characters, introduced in a funny what-if conversation about the deadliness of hawks of all things, are in an ordinary car on an ordinary road when they realize something is wrong. They can’t understand why the turn they were supposed to take hasn’t come up yet. When they turn back, they are greeted by a dead end, and then something absolutely terrifying happens. Dozens of people come running out of the forest, screaming and grabbing at the quartet like something out of a Danny Boyle “28” movie, but this is not a zombie flick. They don’t really want the heroes of our story; they want their car. The group drives away and realizes that every time they stop, the people will come for them. The road goes on seemingly forever; their car doesn’t run out of gas; the group doesn’t need to worry about food. They just need to always keep driving.
Of course, the brilliant concept of “It Ends” is a metaphor for young people about to head out on the unending road of adult life, but writer/director Alexander Ullom never hammers his themes or overexplains his concept. How each of the four passengers responds to the impossible situation says a lot about their characters with someone like Tyler resigned to his fate while James tries to figure out what’s going on and how to solve it. Are they in purgatory? Day and Fisher try to make the most of it, stopping to scream and even dance when they can.
Ullom’s vision sometimes feels a bit stuck between a short and a feature, and there are some lines and performance beats that feel a little clunky, but I almost liked it more for its rough edges. It’s imperfect and sometimes terrifying, kind of like the early days of adulthood.
Significantly more frustrating is Chad Hartigan’s rom-com “The Threesome,” a movie with two truly winning performances anchored to an entirely unengaging character at the center of this unbelievable movie. Part of the problem with a rom-com like this is that it relies very heavily on viewers rooting for and believing in its protagonist, and the truth is that I wanted both female characters to ditch him and just find happiness on their own.
“The Threesome” is the story of a fateful night for Connor (Jonah Hauer-King), one in which he ends up sleeping with his longtime crush Olivia (Zoey Deutch, electric as always) and a new girl in his life, Jenny (Ruby Cruz, a future star but wasted here). The next morning, Olivia is gone, and Connor and Jenny end up sleeping together again, this time without protection. Connor shortly follows this encounter with an unprotected dalliance with Olivia. Guess what happens next? Both Olivia and Jenny end up pregnant with Connor’s baby, leading to a lot of humor about what pregnancy does to the female body while Connor navigates trying to be a supportive partner to Jenny while he really wants to settle down with Olivia.
It’s not the worst plot for a rom-com, even if it does stretch credulity a bit at times—my favorite being when Connor loses his cool when he discovers that Olivia may still be hooking up with a man in her life while Jenny is carrying Connor’s baby—but the interesting characters in this movie keep getting sidelined in favor of Connor’s selfish journey. Deutch and Cruz do all they can to give the film some life, but Hauer-King can’t keep up. I’m not even blaming the performer as much as a script that never gives this guy an interesting inner monologue or effective journey. He’s boring. And there’s nothing worse for a threesome than when one of its members puts you to sleep.
There’s a similar “I don’t recognize that as actual human behavior” aspect to Dean Imperial’s baffling “Caper,” a movie that wants to play like a riff on “The Hangover” or “Very Bad Things” but never feels like it actually takes place in the real world. Sometimes, a comedy can sound out of tune like a piano that needs maintenance or a guitar that needs its strings tightened, and that’s the case here with jokes that thud and twists that consistently sound more manufactured than genuine. I don’t mind exaggerated comedies, but “Caper” can’t find the right tone, needing to go truly surreal to work. Instead, it gets lost between real and zany, just ending up bland.
Christopher Tramantana (easily the best thing about the film) plays a theatre director named Chris, who is going to a poker night with his buddies, most of whom seem vaguely stuck at that point in life when career and relationships are often collapsing. It’s not exactly a midlife crisis phase, but it’s close to it with new jobs and divorces either just behind or ahead of them on the horizon. One of the members of this crew—and one of the film’s many problems is that they all seem more like actors thrown together than a group with actual friend chemistry that is supposed to have known each other for years—has a serious problem: He sent a dick pic to his boss instead of his lover. He’s sure he’s going to be fired. The group rallies to figure out how to save their buddy, including getting the text out of the cloud before it’s read, an attempted bribery of a doorman, and, eventually, breaking and entering.
Supposedly based on a true story, “Caper” has its heart in the right place—we haven’t seen a movie like it about a group of male friends who will do anything, even break the law, for each other in some time—but the execution is another manner. It’s a comedy without laughs, a movie that plods through its story with crude jokes in place of actual humor. Chris is memorable because Tramantana holds the screen well, but I couldn’t tell you much about anyone else in this movie and certainly won’t be able to by the time SXSW ends, much less weeks or months from now. Every festival as big as SXSW has more than a few movies destined to get lost in the waves of premieres. I hope “It Ends” doesn’t. I would be surprised if “Caper” doesn’t.