The Endless (2017)

directed by Aaron Moorehead, Justin Benson
USA
112 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This has been my most anticipated movie for a long time, so when it finally dropped on Netflix, I jumped on it. Moorehead and Benson's previous film Resolution bothered me in a way few horror movies do, and I'd heard that The Endless had some vague ties to that film, which made me even more excited. 

The Endless is about two brothers, played by the directors, who return to the cult/commune they grew up in out of some weird sense of nostalgia. Of course, this does not end well. This is a movie that's hard to talk about without spoiling, because you basically have to watch the thing from start to finish to begin understanding what it's doing and where it's coming from. It's interesting to compare the horror in The Endless with the horror in Resolution, because in comparison to Resolution, the horror in this movie has a more concrete form- yet it's still this nebulous, overarching power; less "monster in the woods" and more "monster IS the woods". It's one part monster, one part implications. And it has a brutal way of making humans look small and powerless.

For how unsettling it can occasionally get, this movie also feels personal, and the lives of the two main characters are inextricably tied to the plot of the film as a whole. Before slipping entirely into cosmic-horror mode, I kind of felt like a lot of what was happening was subjective rather than objective- like watching two people get scared by things that scared only them. Moorehead and Benson never let the viewer forget that they're watching a narrative, and, more interestingly, they never seem to let their characters forget that they're inside a narrative, which to me is the most fascinating thing about both this and Resolution. At every turn the main characters are positioned as small pawns within the grasp of something larger, and that's a unique place for the filmmakers to put themselves in as actors: not playing themselves, but playing versions of themselves, people who, to some extent, become aware of their existence within a specific context that they can't be separated from at the risk of death.

This film is also explicitly Lovecraftian, and I enjoyed that part of it because it skips the tentacles entirely and goes straight to the heart of what makes Lovecraftian horror so horrifying. You really get a sense of something huge. It's almost as if the act of writing fiction itself is the monster. Spring notwithstanding (I'm sorry but I felt like that movie had entirely too much mansplaining in it), these two have the potential to continue turning the horror genre on its head by creating films that examine the nature of fiction while pulling existential horrors to the forefront.