Mark Reviews Movies: THE ENDLESS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 19, 2018

Epigraphs are often overlooked, mostly because they can be abused so easily. Here, though, the epigraph of The Endless is essential. We get a quote about fear from H.P. Lovecraft, an expert on the subject if there ever was one, and the how greatest fear is that of the unknown. The second quote comes from, appropriate enough, an unknown source about the strange relationship between siblings when it comes to expressing one's feelings or opinions about a brother or sister. The death bed, the quote argues, is the most convenient time for such a conversation to occur.

There, essentially, we have it: the unknown and the unspoken. Those are the central themes of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's clever, imaginative, and sometimes tough-to-comprehend film, which involves an apparent death cult, a series of time loops, and an unseen entity that seems to take great pleasure in the drama of petty humans.

The story is kind of a sequel to and definitely an expansion of the story of the duo's 2013 film Resolution, which was itself clever, imaginative, and often tough-to-comprehend in a slightly different way. This follow-up clarifies some of what happened in its predecessor, but for context, that film was aggressively ambiguous. The good news is that those who don't know the preceding film will be just as confounded by this one as those who have seen it.

Maybe that's bad news in the minds of some people, but the point is that Benson's screenplay provides a self-contained work of mind-messing. We're provided a series of mysteries, and by the end, each one has more or less been answered—at least as far as puzzles involving death cults, time loops, and ancient, ageless monsters can be answered. This is a film that embraces the idea that such things are and likely should remain mostly unknown. Where would the fun be in a clear-cut answer? More importantly, what horrors would result in the solutions?

The story follows two brothers named Justin and Aaron, played, respectively and appropriately enough, by Benson and Moorhead. About a decade ago, they escaped a cult that made camp in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. After a fleeting bit of fame for exposing the true nature of the camp and its inhabitants, the brothers have had a rough time in dead-end jobs. They feel uncomfortable and, in Aaron's case for sure, unfulfilled in normal life. They don't have friends. Both are going through a de-programming process that promises only a lifetime of trying to adjust to life outside of the cult.

A package arrives at the door of the brothers' apartment. It contains an old videotape with a message from Anna (Callie Hernandez), a member of the cult, who informs them that "the ascension" is approaching. Aaron thinks a return to Camp Arcadia would be beneficial for some closure. Justin grudgingly agrees.

Things at the camp practically have remained the same. In fact, the people there don't appear to have aged much over the past decade. It's still being run by Hal (Tate Ellington), although he insists that the camp doesn't have a leader: He just talks more than the other members. Anna still designs and makes clothes, and Shane (Shane Brady) has become an adept magician. The rule of thumb is that it takes a million hours—about the age of 115, with hours upon hours every day devoted to practice—to perfect a skill. The way the camp members talk of it, they give the impression that 115 years of life is an attainable goal.

That's about as far as I'm willing to go into the specifics of the actual plot. In more general terms, what follows is a string of strange goings-on, featuring some seemingly physics-defying tricks (Shane appears to make a baseball disappear, and there's a ritual involving a rope that's tied to an unseen thing that pulls back) and a cast of variously eccentric characters. Some more clues appear to the brothers in the form of photographs that either materialize without warning or fall from the sky. The clues lead somewhere, point to something, and might be protected by a monster. Anna introduces Aaron to a drug that allows him to see reflections within the natural world, which, in this place, includes two visible moons and a third one that only appears when the time is right.

Elsewhere in the woods, there's a man named Carl (James Jordan) who stalks back and forth across the campgrounds, seemingly in a hurry to get nowhere in particular, as well as a duo in a house. They're Chris (Vinny Curran) and Michael (Peter Ciella), the two guys from Benson and Moorhead's earlier film, who have moved well beyond Michael's attempts to get his pal clean and sober—except that they really, really haven't.

The film plays it coy with the details, until the various pieces of its puzzle come together in the third act, as the brothers to explore even stranger things—a dead body and its living counterpart existing side by side, a grisly scene in a tent that repeats itself every few seconds, even more visual hints left by an entity that seems to see everything. It's not just a game for Benson and Moorhead, though. There's a level of existential dread to this place and the fates of its inhabitants that's both absurdly amusing and genuinely terrifying.

Beneath the story's weird surface, there's also a perceptive study of the fraught relationship between the two brothers. The Endless provides plenty of mind-bending ideas, tough questions, and morbid gags, but that relationship provides the film's greatest mystery, most difficult question, and funniest joke: How much craziness is it going to take for two brothers to tell each other how they really feel?

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