“The Endless” asks one burning question: what would make you travel back to the UFO Death Cult you escaped from a decade before? Surely Jonestown and Waco were warning enough? Is life in 21st Century America so appalling, so unappealing that you would venture headfirst into the distinct possibility of mass annihilation?
For brothers Aaron and Justin (played by the directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson), life in a post-cult world is a desaturated folly. Released into the giddy hope of Obama’s America, we see news footage of the brothers readjusting to normal society as tabloid curios. As any feral child raised by wolves will tell you, you’re only as good as the next dog boy pulled from the jungle. Now they scratch a living as cleaners, pursued by debts, the detritus of the Trumpian apocalypse slowly drowning in the scum of the President’s fake tan.
Aaron is wistful, dreaming of his former life in the Californian sun eating vegetables and singing around the campfire. Life was good, life was structured, no bumps in the road, no fatal car crashes that killed their parents. His older brother Justin is more pragmatic, the driving force of their escape but driven by the guilt that he robbed his brother of his surrogate family. Against his better judgement Justin agrees to take Aaron back to Camp Arcadia to see if the cult was suicidal or just misunderstood.
From the passenger side, California is wide, golden and alluring. Aaron and Justin’s dust bowl odyssey is framed by twin nuclear reactors that take them past the roadside shrine to their dead parents and twin murmurations of birds. Oddballs punctuate mountainous dirt tracks, but the cult leader and his followers are softly spoken hipsters. They make money by selling craft beer to the locals and get their kicks by singing retro karaoke, surrounded by analogue devices. We all know hipsters don’t want to grow up but these cultists never age, immortal in their aloofness, a Williamsburg time bubble transported west.
Aaron is mesmerised by each member’s ability to master a skill and fulfil his or her potential. Card tricks, or Indian rope magic, or reworking vintage clothes might fly in this hipster cult but what use are they in the real world? Justin sees through the anti-establishment cool for what it is, the faux intelligentsia burying their heads in the hipster sand. These infantilized adults stand in circles waiting to be delivered from the sweaty billionaire claws of reality by “The Ascension” rather than confront the evil head on.
Yet even Justin can’t ignore the strange sepia flash in the heavens, the scratchy Polaroid pictures, and the collapsing trees. What lurks in the lake? What observes with cold disdain from the cosmos? What forms do our gods and devils take when we have forsaken them and then sought them out again? The pitiless deity in “The Endless” communicates via videotape, a media savvy horror exploiting its public in relentless loops of time, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years and decades.
“The Endless” asks a further question, do you want a future of comfort and certainty that comes at the expense of freedom and decency? Or do you want to impose yourself on a fragile, explosive world ruled by a vulgar hairpiece atop a vague, formless silhouette of a human being? Plenty of Americans ignored the foul Lovecraftian menace that slithered into the White House, Aaron and Justin race toward it at full speed.
I like science fiction movies that make you think, like short stories do, rather than presenting you with an endless cavalcade of CGI, shallow plots and bad acting. I’m looking forward to this movie! I just can’t seem to figure out when, or where, it’s going to be released here in SW Florida.