The Endless, a effective low-budget horror film, embodies our anxiety about free will. Two brothers, Justin and Aaron, are at loose ends, living hand-to-mouth and doing menial labor. They were raised on a commune somewhere in northern California, a place that Aaron recalls fondly but that the slightly older Justin remembers as a vicious death cult. Aaron yearns for the orderly life at the Arcadia Camp as the place styles itself, the good organic food, and camaraderie. Justin is skeptical: he recalls that all the men at the camp were castrated and that some sort of evil presided over the place. Aaron receives an old-fashioned VHS recording in the mail from Arcadia that shows him and his brother -- this is puzzling and stirs up unsettled memories in the young man. As you might expect, Aaron's desire to visit Arcadia is opposed by Justin, but, in the end, he agrees that they will go back to the place for a weekend. (The film's two main characters, Justin and Aaron are Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the movie's co-directors.)
The camp is full of grinning hipsters who haven't aged in the ten years that Justin and Aaron have been absent. The place is built under a volcano cone near a lake and is surrounded by many miles of wilderness. Arcadia brews beer, no doubt a very fashionable and astringent IPA, and everyone purports delight at seeing Justin and Aaron again. But, in classic horror film fashion, it's clear that all is not what it seems at Arcadia. Some of the members seem lobotomized into bizarre jollity; a man paces endlessly back and forth and a girl sketches images of the camp under the sway of a vast billowing black entity that looks vaguely like a bat. Obviously, the place harbors dark secrets. Each night, there are campfires that involve odd games -- someone throws a rope up into the air where some invisible force seizes it and, then, plays tug-of-war with the cult-member holding the other end of the tether. A cottage is padlocked. Weird sounds emerge from the dark and there's a Victorian-looking wall-tent in a clearing where a clock keeps advancing five seconds and, then, running backward while the canvas shakes and terrible noises come from within. One of the cult members has written an elaborate equation on a blackboard but says that he can't solve it. Sometimes, in the background of shots, trees collapse inexplicably or the air trembles as if with heat waves. Paths in the camp are demarcated by strange-looking staffs driven into the ground to create seemingly protected pathways. One of the cult members suggests that the skeptic Justin dive to the bottom of the lake -- there he encounters some sort of inky black monster. But he retrieves a box in which there is a another video cassette. The entity apparently communicates by images imprinted on polaroids, VHS tape, film, and cassettes. The video shows Justin denouncing the cult when he and his brother left ten years ago. Justin tells the media that the cult is bizarre and suicidal. One of the cult members is aggrieved and, in the funniest line of the movie, says: "We just wanted to brew beer and sell it to support ourselves and you made everyone think we were some kind of UFO-worshiping, dickless Heaven's Gate spin-off." As you might expect, Justin slowly discovers what is going on at the camp and, then, of course, must attempt to escape -- although his brother, Aaron, is ambivalent and would prefer to remain. (Spoilers necessarily follow.)
The Endless combines two motifs: time loops and Lovecraftian "Color out of Space" horror. As it happens, a malign, nameless, shapeless entity inhabits the area. This entity ensnares its victims in the time-loops -- for its own diabolical entertainment, the monstrous force creates a "Ground Hog Day" time-loop in which the members of the cult, and, in fact, anyone in the region must die horribly over and over again. (It's not clear what benefit the entity attains from this exercise, but, as you know, some things are beyond mortal ken.) The cult members, apparently, are sucked up into the entity and killed, only to be resurrected again for another cycle. The more enterprising folks in the region try to evade the monster's designs by killing themselves, but this just yields time-loops in which their suicides occur over and over again ad infinitum. Apparently, the monster has been influencing people to die repeatedly in looping scenarios for a long time. We learn that the Victorian era tent is occupied by a 19th century explorer or hunter who keeps committing some kind of gory suicide every five seconds just off-screen in his canvas dwelling. The philosophical issue arising from this premise relates to repetition and free will -- the suicides claim to be exercising free-will in defying the monster by killing themselves; the cult members are obedient to the entity and allow themselves to be sacrificed, apparently, on a biweekly basis. The anxieties that the film explores are integral to being human. We are creatures of habit and like everything to be, more or less, the same every day -- but, at the same time, we yearn for adventure and novelty. The cult is attractive in that it offers the same experiences in a comfortably regulated way day after day. And, yet, the price of this comfort is foregoing any claim to have agency or free-will. In the universe of the film, those who assert agency end up just killing themselves over and over again although one of these figures, asserts that his self-murder is, at least, his own free act. This notion is expressed by films and videos that loop and stop time. Every photograph, as Barthes has argued, is funereal, an image of death that is fundamentally uncanny. Religion, if considered in the light of the film, requires rituals -- and what are rituals if not time loops in which the same moment of the encounter with the divine is re-enacted endlessly? Ultimately, the film is self-reflective -- it's a genre picture, a horror film, and we understand these sorts of movies because they reiterate motifs and themes that are looped to create specific type of film we are watching. The question that the film's ambiguous ending proposes is whether free will exists or is merely illusory.
The picture is well-acted. Justin embodies the concept of agency and free will. Aaron represents the desire for security and predictability that people find in cults or religion. The film doesn't require much in the way of special effects and there's nothing gaudy about anything that we see. The parched semi-desert landscapes and the mountainous volcanic peaks are effectively used. The movie creates an eerie uncanny mood that is pleasantly scary. It's a "mumble-core" production and I didn't understand more than about half of the dialogue -- the rest was inaudible. Some of the big effects don't work -- a lynx or cougar that apparently keeps killing a camper is represented in a CGI effect that is on the wrong side of the "uncanny divide"; it's laughably weird. An important plot point involves a car battery that is depleted (difficult to escape when you can't start your car). The heroes have to push the pickup truck while the monster with fiery gaseous tentacles is pursuing them. The truck-pushing shots seem to have been filmed day-for-night in the studio and they don't match the long shots showing the vehicle on a causeway and the entity billowing after it. But these are minor distractions and the film is generally entertaining, scary in a loopy kind of way, and thought-provoking.
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