After receiving a video cassete from Camp Arcadia, a UFO death cult, brothers Justin and Aaron, their ex-members, decide to drive back to the commune for a day to reconnect with the members, since their lives in the city are going nowhere. The commune lies in the middle of nowhere. Nobody seems to have aged in the meantime. A member, Anna, seems interested in Aaron. However, strange things start happening. Justin encounters a man in two versions at once: both dead, hanged in his shed, and alive. The man explains him that the entity trapped them in a time loop and is replaying them, and that they have to either kill themselves or the entity is going to kill them, until a new cycle begins, all for the entity's amusement. Justin and Aaron escape in their car from the place, just before the three Moons appear on the sky and the entity destroys the place.
A strange mish-mash and horror version of "Groundhog Day", "The Entity" and "The Wicker Man", "The Endless" is an intelligent, ambitious and surely directed independent film, but it is rather incoherent in its meandering storyline, which is why its final act disappoints. It starts off mysteriously and engaging, with the two protagonists Aaron and Justin, ex-members of a cult, deciding to drive back to the commune and try to reconnect with their members, though they are ambivalent about them, which is represented neatly in the scene where a cult member greets them: he hugs Aaron, but just shakes hands with the formal Justin, who keeps his distance. Throughout the film, the viewers sense something is off the entire time, but cannot quite put their finger on it: during an evening, a man shows his magic trick by throwing a baseball up in the air, as Justin waits for an awkward minute for it to fall back down, but it doesn't. The man then stretches out Justin's hand, and the baseball falls exactly in his hand, freaking him out. There is also a surreal sequence, also at night, when Justin is pulling a rope against someone (or something) at the other side of the dark in the open. However, the dialogues are boring, schematic and stiff, exhausting the viewers' patience in the overlong first half, whereas the characters are all mostly routine. Since the entire story leads up to the final act when the plot twist is presented and everything should be explained, a problem occurs, since not everything fits in the end, and it doesn't feel like a proper conclusion. The ending feels almost arbitrary, and not that well thought out, raising questions as to why so many random subplots and plot points were introduced before, when the movie could have been half an hour shorter. One great moment: random magical sticks are placed in the ground, and as the protagonists cross through these invisible "borders", they enter a different time. This is demonstrated in an imaginative scene where Justin is walking, an empty hill is seen above him, but as he crosses the "border", suddenly a trailer appears on the hill, since he entered a different time.
Grade:++
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