I should start by saying that "The Endless" blew my mind the first time I saw it. I waited to review it until I had seen it a second time. Did it blow my mind, again? No, but that is not a qualitative statement. This time, I knew what to expect from this endlessly inventive indie sci fi flick and was able to savor it like an old wine or something.
The two filmmakers, Benson and Moorhead are among the most talented working in the US today. They join a long line of personal faves, including Brit Marling, Shane Carruth and Jamin Winans. Why do I say "talented"? Because they create highly interesting, though-provoking story lines and execute them with cinematic flourish. And apparently do it for a fraction of what it costs a big Studio to make a film. This Benson and Moorhead proved in the great "Spring" and they continue to do in "The Endless", which is not only the best film they have made but one of the best to come out in years.
At one level, "The Endless" concerns two brothers living near Echo Park in LA, one of whom longs to return to the "UFO Death Cult" that they both escaped from many years earlier. What a great set up for a plot - right away you know one wants to go back, and the other does not, creating a great tension to drive the rising action of the story. But most of all you really want to know about the UFO Death Cult. Really…
Of course, they do return to said cult which is located somewhere in the mountains above San Diego. And that is right about where the conventional nature of the story, and the storytelling starts to unravel. From weird atmospheric disturbances to telling recollections about the cult-members wanting to commit mass-suicide it quickly becomes apparent that nothing is what it appears to be. Or, if you buy that a strange “presence” is living in a shallow lake and causing space and time to warp, and creating an infinite loop that some characters can’t escape, well, then everything is exactly as it appears to be.
Here is where I need to warn those who don’t like ambiguity, or head trips in their films to stay away from “The Endless”. On the other hand, if you love to have your mind thoroughly f-ed with, then get thee to this film ASAP.
The brothers return to the wonderfully named Camp Arcadia where the members of the un-named cult are living. Benson and Moorhead use the ordinariness of the location, and the relative normality of the camp’s residents to ground the small but eerie details that begin to throw everything off the rails. One guy seems to be, well, just smiling all the time. You want to know why. The leader of the group who keeps insisting it is “not a cult” (important safety tip: if the apparent leader of a group of people says it is not a cult, it probably is) and saying the words with an almost Manson-esque smoothness. There is an odd shack that has a lock on it that looks like it was stolen from a Final Fantasy game. Again, you really, really want to know what it is in the shack.
What seem to be manipulative plot devices create a thirst on the part of the viewer to know “what the f is really happening here”. And when one, and then both brothers set out to try to figure that out, you get the true strangeness of the third reel. A dude who is living in a shanty, with his doppelganger hanging from a noose; a drug addict chained to the wall of his house, trying to get sober (an apparent homage to an earlier film, “Resolution”), and a character described in the credits as just a “late eighteenth century man” is running into the wall of his tent, over and over again as the old timey clock in a post keeps resetting and running for the same ten seconds.
And that is not even the weird part. If you want to know more, please, please watch “The Endless”. It is available on Amazon Prime Video for a nominal rental fee – which the film-makers deserve, by the way, for squeezing so much creativity into 111 minutes.
