The Endless: You Can Come Home Again, And You Will

Every now and then I’ll run across a movie while writing this thing that barely qualifies as a scary movie. I’m pretty ecumenical about what I consider “scary movies,” - to me it’s about the emotional experience (I’ve seen slasher films that were a fraction as horrifying as, say, Dancer In The Dark), not signifiers or clichés or specific directors or studios or what-have-you. What I really like are the ones that seems like one thing for most of their runtime, and then turn into something else entirely when you least expect it. Where everything’s normal, until it isn’t.

At its beginning, The Endless is damn near an indie drama, a touching story about the difficulty of family, the ways we repeat patterns in our lives, and what a struggle honest communication can be. And then…well, it doesn’t stop being about that, but it also opens up into something stranger.

Ten years ago, Aaron bundled up his younger brother Justin, and they fled from the UFO cult their family belonged to, just ahead of something ominously referred to as “The Ascension.” But life outside the cult has been tough - they’re barely scraping by, and no matter how much Aaron tells him that they’re better on the outside, Justin doesn’t remember any of the weird shit. He just remembers being happier than he is now. And then one day, a package arrives in the mail. It’s beaten up, with stamps on it from all over the place. It took a long time to find them.

Inside is a videotape, with people they know from back home. They’re just about to start The Ascension, and want Aaron and Justin to know they’re always welcome back.

This sets off a tug-of-war between them - their relationship is believably fractious, Aaron is controlling and insists he knows best, even when it’s apparent that he doesn’t, and Justin resents being yanked out of his home without his say-so all those years ago. Their lives are miserable and desperate, and Justin wants nothing more than to go back someplace where they ate fresh food, sang songs, and were surrounded by people who loved them. To go back to when he was happy. And because Aaron is his brother, and loves him, he relents and agrees to make the trip back to Camp Arcadia for one day, so Justin can see for himself the madness they escaped.

So Aaron and Justin make the long drive out into the boondocks, and when they get there, everyone’s happy to see them, and they all look great - clean air and healthy living mean they don’t look any different than they did when Aaron and Justin left.

Ten years ago.

What follows, as Aaron and Justin spend time at the camp, taps into a lot of what makes cults seductive. Everyone is friendly, welcoming, patient and kind and understanding. This is what makes cults attractive, an uncritical, unconditional (at first) acceptance of the lost and lonely and aimless. Sometimes the price (and there’s always a price) for that welcoming and approval is tolerable, sometimes it’s not, but they never start off scary, so there’s a tension there. There’s also tension in the way Aaron and Justin respond to the people at Camp Arcadia. Their life outside the cult  is neatly shorthanded as poverty and desperation - they clean houses (and not especially nice ones) for a living, they live on packaged ramen, and early on, Aaron gets angry at Justin for using what little money they had to buy an old camcorder instead of the new car battery they actually need to maintain what precarious livelihood they have. Their exchanges are sharp, shot through with the kind of impatience and barely-hidden grudges that you only find between people who have known each other too well for too long. When they return to the camp, Aaron maintains his skeptical distance but Justin jumps right in like the little kid he was when they left - he’s eating fresh food, singing songs, playing games, and the people there are happy to see him. He has all of the things his life outside is lacking, and so we feel like we’re watching Aaron lose Justin to the thing he worked so hard to escape, and that thing is a cult, so there’s sadness and dread throughout.

On top of that, everything begins to feel progressively stranger and more off-kilter as they travel to and arrive at Camp Arcadia. The sunlight is a little too harsh, the cinematography feels a little curved or bent around the edges, like a very subtle fisheye effect, and everything in the camp seems a bit off, even as cults go. Mysterious notes pop up everywhere, everyone looks (and dresses) the same as they did when Aaron and Justin left a decade before, a silent man jogs out of camp every day but never seems to return, and the camp is surrounded by strange geological and meteorological phenomena. As the film moves on, there’s an increasing emphasis on cryptic images - videotapes, paintings, photographs, some innocuous, some ominous, sometimes appearing from thin air. Dwellings glimpsed from afar that shake and thud, screams coming from inside. The longer they stay, the more unreal everything feels.

Cults and homecomings alike, it’s always smiles and games and warmth to start, but the other shoe has to drop, and we spend a decent chunk of the film waiting to the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t, not in the way we think it will. Not everything (or everyone) is as it seems, and yes, there is something very wrong in Camp Arcadia, but Camp Arcadia is a symptom, not the disease, and as the cosmic horror of what’s happening out in the wilderness reveals itself. a wry, deadpan sense of humor helps leaven things a little. It all dovetails nicely into a moral of sorts, into closure that emphasizes the need for and value in breaking the circle. We keep coming back to the same places we were before, to the same struggles and grievances, again and again.

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Available on Netflix