The Endless: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s weird sci-fi/ horror hybrid is an indie triumph.

US: 2017/ 111 mins/ Cert 15

Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Cast: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Callie Hernandez, Tate Ellington

The Endless is the third low budget feature from filmmaking partners Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Following on from their acclaimed 2014 body-horror, Spring, which Guillermo del Toro described as “one of the best horror films of this decade”, Benson and Moorhead’s latest collaboration inhabits the same mystical universe as Resolution, revisiting many of the themes and  containing similar narrative motifs which were introduced in their 2012 debut. The film was also scripted by Benson with Moorhead taking the director of photography duties.

In addition to their responsibilities behind the camera, Benson and Moorhead also take the leading roles in the film, playing Justin and Aaron Smith, two brothers who escaped the clutches of Camp Arcadia, a southern Californian UFO cult on which they were raised. Scraping by on low paid cleaning jobs, the brothers eke out a meagre existence and there is an underlying hostility between the two siblings which is exacerbated by their dull lives. The older brother, Justin, had reported the activities of the camp to the press claiming it to be a “death cult” whereas Aaron is developing feelings of nostalgia towards the idyllic life of the commune and resentment towards his brother for taking him away. When a strange video arrives from the cult, the brothers return to Arcadia, aiming to seek closure on what had been a traumatic period of their young lives. They plan to stay for one night only but their visit is lengthened as they rekindle their relationships with the commune members and are drawn into the mystery surrounding the camp. Witnessing a series of unexplainable phenomena which begins to threaten their grip on reality, the brothers begin to believe that there may be some truth in the cult’s beliefs that there is some supernatural force out there in the Californian landscape which is controlling their destinies.

The Endless is a generic mash-up which is so brilliantly imaginative that it defies categorisation. Part sci-fi/horror hybrid, part family sibling drama, its fantasy elements are grounded in an almost documentary style mode of filmmaking with the use of handheld camera combined with wide-lens panoramic shots of the Californian landscape complementing the naturalism of the performances. The CGI effects which come more to the fore towards the end of the film are for the most part unobtrusive and the avoidance of standard horror clichés and reliance upon atmosphere and mood, rather than imagery, to inject fear invoke a genuine sense of unease. It is an enigmatic, weirdly intoxicating and unsettling film which instilled in me a sense of existential anxiety that I have rarely felt at the cinema.

With this film, Benson and Moorhead prove that an original concept, well executed, is worth far more than lavish special effects and a huge budget. A twist on the Nietzschean eternal return as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft and David Lynch, The Endless is a genre-bending, time-warping, head-tripping triumph which deserves to reach a large audience.