NEON's Brutally Intelligent Cosmic Horror: The Review is Over

Our quartet of heroes escapes this initial brush with invasion, but for the rest of the film, all they have before them is an open, seemingly endless road into nature. And if they ever dream of stopping again for more than 90 seconds, perhaps even to explore the surrounding woods, they will have to face the incessant horde of the damned or the forgotten. It is unclear where this road will end, but each character must process in their own way the discovery of abandoned cars on the road they came from, each with odometers exceeding a million miles, or at least two years if you drive non-stop, without sleep and taking turns at the wheel.

There are layers of ingenuity in Ullom's premise. The first and most obvious is the elegance with which it avoids the resource scarcity a debut indie film like The Review is Over might have. (Before its acquisition by NEON, it was a small genre sensation at SXSW.) The film is composed almost entirely of four characters in a car, along with deceptively picturesque camerawork and drone shots of the nature outside, driving forward, always forward. Like Sisyphus condemned to push a rock uphill, the children must endure what is a kind of inexplicable divine judgment or cosmic cruelty by remaining in constant motion. Or at least their car does as they watch the world pass by from their seats.

Also a bit akin to the sinister thought experiments James might never return to in his philosophy classes, the apparent futility of this exercise demands that our heroes ask themselves more significant questions. It is a credit to Ullom's script, then, that it allows all four characters to have varying degrees of self-awareness. Before the first act of the 89 minutes taught is over, they debate whether this is hell and if they are dead. But if this is indeed the House of Perdition, what could any of them have done to deserve this kind of apathetic existence?

The Review is Over presents existential challenges, but also banal ones as the characters slowly run out of spiritual, and then trivial, things to discuss. Slowly and surely all that is left is simply to assess what their relationships are... or were, as silence becomes more appealing.

This is my first encounter with any of the four actors who collectively do a solid job, though Yoon gets most of the anguish to explore as James remains the only one of the group who won't let go of the dream that the road ends and that there is a reason they are here. In their own way, the other friends keep themselves interested by savoring the smaller things, like a marker discovered in an abandoned vehicle that allows them to redecorate the Jeep's interior, or the chance to scream into the void during one of their 60-second breaks outside the car each morning. Yoon, however, plays a character who breaks more forcefully because he holds on longer.

It doesn't take much squinting to recognize the larger metaphor at play: the optimism and naivete of young minds who thought their journey would go in one direction and who never reached that goal. Instead, they find themselves on a road they can neither reconcile nor explain. Searching for meaning may be as fruitless as the aforementioned Sisyphus and his rock. Demanding answers to existence has always required a bit of self-flagellation.