Liminal Spaces Need Logic, Not Just Aesthetics

Alexander Ullom's "It Ends" arrives trailing the usual critical apparatus for young horror directors these days: liminal spaces, Gen-Z existential dread, the visual language of transitional anxiety rendered as threat. The film positions its characters in corridors and waiting rooms and threshold moments. Critics have lined up to declare it a generational mirror, the horror movie that finally captures what it feels like to be young and untethered in 2026.

This move is not new. In 2014, Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook" got framed the same way — as millennial grief-made-visible, a film that supposedly diagnosed an entire generation's unprocessed trauma through the metaphor of a mother unable to mourn. The critical consensus declared it a generational horror classic, and the secondary market followed. But "The Babadook" endured not because it successfully bottled millennial anxiety into a neat visual formula. It endured because Kent started with a precise emotional mechanism — the way grief inverts into rage. How that inversion lives inside a single relationship. And the film happened to resonate generationally as a consequence. The texture was specific. The psychology was airtight.

What happened next revealed the difference. Dozens of films tried to replicate the formula by starting with the diagnosis first. What does Gen-X feel, what does Gen-Z feel. Then building a visual language around it. Most of them were forgotten within months. They had the right aesthetic vocabulary and the right thematic gesture, but no actual mechanism underneath. They were portraits of anxiety rather than investigations of it.

The real test for "It Ends" is not whether Ullom has captured a generational mood or mastered liminal-space cinematography. It is whether the film's treatment of transitional dread emerges from a specific, particular emotional or psychological logic that happens to resonate outward, or whether it starts with the generational diagnosis and works backward to find images that fit. One approach produces something that deepens on a second viewing because you discover the mechanism. The other produces something that feels complete the moment you recognize the reference.

Watch whether the liminal spaces function as mere setting or as the actual logic of the characters' relationships. If the waiting rooms and hallways are optional window dressing around a standard anxiety narrative, Ullom has made a period piece. If the transitional space itself is the emotional problem the characters cannot solve, he has made something that might outlast the current cycle of generational horror.