The road not taken seriously enough
There's a specific kind of frustration reserved for films that earn your attention in the first thirty minutes and then spend the remaining ninety minutes squandering it. How It Ends, David M. Rosenthal's 2018 Netflix collapse thriller, belongs firmly in that category. It opens with dread and closes with a shrug, and the distance between those two poles tells you most of what you need to know about where the film goes wrong.
That's a shame, because the bones here are good — or at least good enough to make you want to argue with the finished product rather than simply dismiss it.
The premise
The setup is stripped-down and effective. A young man in Chicago is trying to patch up his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend's disapproving father when some kind of catastrophe — seismic, maybe military, definitely national — cuts off communications from the West Coast, where the girlfriend is. The two men, adversaries by temperament and class, are forced into an uneasy alliance and pile into a car headed cross-country through a society that is rapidly coming apart. It's a road movie grafted onto a collapse thriller, with a missing-woman plot providing the emotional engine.
On paper, that's a solid pitch. The buddy dynamic has inherent friction. The collapsing infrastructure gives the journey stakes. And the deliberate vagueness about what actually happened — never fully explained, which is a choice that cuts both ways — keeps things unsettled in a way that could have been used to real effect.
Craft: the performances do the heavy lifting
Theo James plays the lead with more conviction than the script probably deserves. He's physically credible and emotionally present in a way that sells the desperation of a man trying to get back to someone he loves through a world that no longer works. The scenes where he has to make hard, rapid decisions feel honest — there's no action-hero posturing, just someone improvising badly in a bad situation, which is the right note.
Forest Whitaker as the girlfriend's father is the more interesting presence. He plays the role with a coiled, formal dignity that makes the character's gradual unraveling genuinely affecting. The early scenes between the two men, before the collapse, have a recognizable social texture — the uneasy Sunday dinner, the performative politeness masking real hostility. Whitaker brings weight to a character who could easily have been a stock obstacle, and the evolving dynamic between the two men is the film's most consistently rewarding thread.
Rosenthal handles the visual grammar of social collapse reasonably well. The world deteriorates in stages rather than all at once — traffic jams giving way to abandoned vehicles giving way to roadblocks manned by people with too many guns and too little information. That graduated descent into lawlessness has a procedural plausibility that's more unnerving than any single spectacular set piece could be. The Pacific Northwest landscape (standing in for the cross-country route) is used well: the grey skies and empty roads do atmospheric work that the screenplay sometimes can't.
What works, and what doesn't
The first act is genuinely tense. The moment communications die and nobody can explain why — that sustained uncertainty, that inability to get a clear picture — captures something true about how collapse might actually feel from the inside. It wouldn't be a dramatic event watched on television; it would be a series of small failures of information and infrastructure that take too long to add up to something comprehensible.
But somewhere in the second act, the film's momentum starts bleeding out. The episodic structure — this encounter, then that encounter, then another — begins to feel arbitrary rather than cumulative. Each set piece exists in relative isolation. There's a tonal inconsistency too: the film can't quite decide whether it wants to be a grounded, realistic survival story or something with more genre electricity, and in hedging, it loses the best qualities of both.
The script's most serious crime, though, is also its final one. The ending — and I'll say nothing more specific than this — is not an ending in any meaningful sense. It lands with the abruptness of a story that simply stopped being told rather than one that concluded. Ambiguity can be a legitimate artistic choice; it can leave a film reverberating in the mind. This doesn't do that. It feels less like a deliberate withholding and more like a structural failure of nerve, or possibly budget, or possibly both. Audiences reported significant frustration with it on release, and that frustration is entirely earned.
There's also a thinly written female character whose primary function is to be located, which is a significant problem in a film that otherwise shows some interest in genuine human texture.
Who it's for
How It Ends is worth watching for viewers who find the collapse-thriller subgenre genuinely interesting and are willing to tolerate real disappointment at the final reel. If you can watch it as a mood piece — a sustained atmosphere of dread and social disintegration — rather than a plot-driven thriller that pays off its own mysteries, you'll extract more value from it. Whitaker fans specifically should seek it out for his performance even if the film around him doesn't deserve it.
If you need narrative resolution or a script that matches its own ambitions, look elsewhere. This is streaming-platform cinema at its most characteristic: plenty of setup, plausible surfaces, and an exit strategy that was never really thought through.
