The Endless

Common wisdom tells us that man is the simpler sex, but common observation tells otherwise. Thanks to social programming, we’re actually pretty complicated. Men are expected to be stoic take-charge sorts, and when you’re taught your whole life to keep your feelings on lockdown, you tend to make routine problems needlessly drawn out: Between two dudes, a dispute that might be resolved by talking turns into an indifferent endurance contest that can only be worked out in the face of certain death, and even then they’d still bust each other’s balls before saying “I love you, man.”
When you layer that aggravating macho reticence with sibling rivalry, the complications deepen. Brotherhood’s a trip. Just ask Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, the horror filmmaking duo responsible for 2012’s Resolution, the “Bonestorm” segment in 2014’s VHS: Viral, and, in the same year, the tender creature romance Spring. Their latest, The Endless, is all about brotherhood couched in unfathomable terror of Lovecraftian proportions. The movie hinges on the petulant squabbles of boys, circular arguments that go nowhere because they’re caught in a perpetual loop of denial and projection. If the exchanges between its leads can be summed up in two words, those words are “no, you.” Boys will be boys, meaning boys will be obstinate and stubborn to the bitter end.
In The Endless, the end is uncertain, but maybe the title makes that a smidge obvious. Brothers Aaron and Justin Smith (played, respectively, by Moorhead and Benson, who gel so well as brothers that you’d swear they’re secretly related) were once members of a UFO death cult before escaping and readjusting to life’s vicissitudes: They clean houses for a living, subsist primarily on ramen, and rely so much on their car that Aaron’s repeated failure to replace the battery weighs on both of them like the heavens on Atlas’ shoulders. Then, out of the blue, they receive a tape in the mail from their former cultists, and at Aaron’s behest they revisit Camp Arcadia, the commune they once called home. He has unresolved feelings about their time spent with the cult, and persuades Justin to hit the road against the latter’s better judgment.
Aaron and Justin view their experiences at Arcadia through different lenses. To Aaron, Arcadia meant food, shelter, a place to lay their heads, and people to care for them. To Justin, Arcadia was a horror show run by a bunch of castrated lunatics with a collective death wish. On arrival, we get the feeling they’re both half-right: The cultists, represented for the most part by Hal (Tate Ellington) and Anna (Callie Hernandez), act normally enough, welcoming the Smiths back to Camp Arcadia with open arms, their long ago getaway not forgotten but forgiven. They’re an amiable bunch. They brew their own beer, too, for personal consumption as well as commercial sale. (Their brewmaster makes a mean Hefeweizen.) But if you’ve seen any horror film involving cults, you’re on high alert the moment Moorhead and Benson take us to the camp.