The Super Powered Fancast

The Endless

Well Go USA Entertainment

Written by Justin Benson

Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

Starring Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Callie Hernandez, Tate Ellington, Lew Temple, James Jordan, Shane Brady and Kira Powell

Rated R

Two brothers (Benson and Moorhead) fill their days at a job that they both hate, but can’t afford to quit. Aaron is convinced that their lives got worse after his older brother Justin took him from the clutches of a doomsday cult out in the desert. When they receive a video tape with a cryptic message from the cult itself, Justin decides to take Aaron back to the cult to try to give his brother some closure.

As they find themselves being welcomed back into the community, strange things start to happen that show that the cult might not be crazy after all. Especially when strange occurrences happen all around them culminating into an event that the members have been preparing for.

The biggest advantage that the film has is that there is time in the narrative to tell an interesting and compelling story, showcase high concept science fiction and still tell a realistic story of the relationship between these two brothers.

The sci-fi elements work because they are grounded in phenomenon that are both scary and interesting. There aren’t any easy answers to what the phenomenon is, where it came from or what it wants and that lets the viewer interpret that for him or herself. The characters are trying to figure themselves out as well as what’s happening to them.

There are some truly creepy and scary elements in this story as well and those moments play out in a way that is unsettling and intriguing to the overall story. There were a few slow moments in the pacing of the scenes with the cult members (specifically everything between Aaron and Anna) where I felt like something was going to happen only to have the moment switch to something else. Those moments seemed to be threads of interesting interpersonal moments that never got realized and that’s a shame.

The Endless is a thought-provoking film with some great sci-fi and horror moments. It takes interesting risks that pay off in both the storytelling and in the visuals and is definitely worth seeing.