Mark Reviews Movies: ENDLESS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 13, 2020

Endless is a shallow and sappy romance, only briefly interrupted by death. The screenplay by Andre Case and Oneil Sharma puts forth a story that teases with notions of grief, guilt, resentment, and hope, but it's mostly concerned with the self-contained rules of its version of limbo. At least that's true when it isn't devising ways to make a story of star-crossed teen lovers even more saccharine and melodramatically tragic after the sudden, senseless death of one of the lovers.

Riley (Alexandra Shipp) and Chris (Nicholas Hamilton) are high school seniors in love. Riley is the daughter of two lawyers, lives in a fancy house, and is university-bound, planning to become an attorney, too. She draws manga-style comic books on the side but has, after some pressure from mom and dad (played by Catherine Haggquist and Ian Tracey), decided that her passion for art is just a hobby.

Chris comes from the other side of the socioeconomic tracks. He lives with his single mother (played by Famke Janssen) and has a passion for driving and repairing motorcycles. It should be mentioned that he really, really loves Riley, if only because there isn't anything else to this character until he dies and learns that he has some other reasons to be upset about his life. That seems pretty unfair on a cosmic level, but it certainly gives the screenwriters an excuse to let Chris' ghost do more than just stalk his living girlfriend.

The boyfriend dies in a car accident after he drank too much at a party, leaving Riley to drive him home in a beat-up car owned by Chris' friend Nate (Eddie Ramos). Nate ends up resenting Riley and, after learning that his car was in such terrible shape before letting her borrow it, starts blaming himself for Chris' death. Does any of this matter or have any kind of real resolution? It doesn't, but again, it certainly lets the filmmakers make us believe the movie is about some kind of genuine emotional stakes.

The real problem, as with so many stories about ghosts hanging around the living in order to try to re-connect or set right something that's wrong, is that there really aren't any genuine emotional stakes to this tale. Chris discovers he's dead and bumps into fellow ghost Jordan (DeRon Horton), a teenager who has been in limbo for 30 years, who vaguely explains the rules of this afterlife. The main one—beyond the notion that spirits eventually move on after some kind of self-realization (It is very, very vague)—is that ghosts can't interact with the living. Chris loves Riley so very, very much, though, that he's determined to prove that rule wrong.

To explain the core of the story—that Chris does learn how to communicate with Riley, proves that he's not a figment of her imagination, and restarts their relationship (well, as well as a ghost and a living person can)—would be triply useless at this point—because it's predictable, obvious, and already contained between those two em dashes. It is, though, fairly confounding just how much unnecessary plot Case and Sharma cram into something so simple.

The most confusing and unnecessary subplot, perhaps, involves a police detective (played by Patrick Gilmore), who seems determined to assign actual, legal guilt on Riley for the accident. For all of the supernatural elements and rules that ultimately distance this story from any real emotion, it's startling that the screenwriters actually find a narrative thread that seems so far removed from either gimmickry or emotion.

There are some solid ideas and character beats here, although they're the ones that have little to nothing to do with Chris' existence in limbo. Such tales feel intrinsically false because neither the audience nor the characters have to deal with legitimate grief. It's just a concept in this story, kept at bay by the inevitable connection between the lovers separated by death. Death and grieving almost don't matter in this story. The climax almost brings that notion to its logical conclusion, as a character decides that death would be better than life in a universe where there is such a post-death existence, and it's as daring in concept as it is wholly irresponsible in execution.

There are only a few times this story actually confronts grief, such as with Chris' mother and his guilt-ridden friend, so we know the screenwriters and director Scott Speer are aware of and want to deal with the reality of death. Endless, though, proves again that such a goal is impossible in a story in which death is just a minor obstacle for a pair of lovers to overcome.

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