The director of Hollywood’s next Gen Z horror hit has already finished filming his next movie. Alex Ullom, the 27-year-old director of It Ends, which premiered at SXSW and is being released in theaters by Neon this weekend, will follow up his lo-fi existential debut with what he describes to Polygon as “straight maximalism.”
“4 X 4: The Event is the complete opposite of It Ends,” Ullom tells me over Zoom.
I’d already scheduled an interview with Ullom to discuss It Ends, which follows four college graduates on a road trip to their new lives that gets derailed when they become trapped on an endless road that defies the laws of nature. But while I was sitting in the virtual waiting room, Deadline reported that his next movie had already wrapped principal photography with a cast that includes Jaden Smith and Sophia Lillis. Deadline adds that the plot is being kept under wraps, but “follows eight contestants as they enter an illegal sensory-assault livestream where they must kill or be killed using only what they can order online.”
A quick scan of IMDb also revealed the following, brief, unsourced synopsis: “Battle Royale meets Saw meets Climax.”
Intriguing.
So once I got on Zoom with Ullom, and after I’d asked all about It Ends (more on that in a future article), I did a bit of prying into his secretive next project.
For starters, what is 4 X 4 about? That Battle Royale reference suggests a reality TV satire in the style of The Running Man.
“Not reality TV,” Ullom replies. “I would call it like, illegal, off-the-grid MrBeast Games meets political revolution and meets Gaspar Noé.”
Noé is the transgressive French director behind the drug-fueled 2018 Climax, along with cult classics like Irreversible and Enter the Void. It’s a surprising reference for the director of a remarkably chill movie that’s as much hangout comedy as it is horror, but it turns out that’s the point.
“I fucking love Gaspar,” Ullom says. “You wouldn’t be able to tell by watching It Ends. If It Ends is minimalism, you know, this is, like, straight maximalism. I’m trying to overload the fucking theater. I want the entire movie to feel like the title sequence of Enter the Void.” (You can watch that here, but please don’t if you’re prone to seizures.)
I’m trying to overload the fucking theater.
That anxiety-inducing title sequence is actually the one clear connection between Noé’s work and It Ends, which features a similarly intense title card roughly 20 minutes into the movie.
“I love the title drop in It Ends,” Ullom says. “That’s the kind of editing style of the entire movie of 4 X 4.”
Next question: When does 4 X 4: The Event take place? In our current present or a more dystopian near-future?
“Do you feel like we live in modern times?” Ullom replies with a grin. He continues: “I think that if you turn on the internet and look at the absolute shit that’s going on… [he trails off]. Honestly, it’s an illegal livestream. That’s what gets the job done there.”
Finally, there’s the cast, which includes both well-known actors and at least one familiar face from It Ends. Gathering the eight participants in this illegal streaming event was a huge ordeal, unlike It Ends, which was reportedly cast via Instagram. When I ask about it, Ullom personally thanks casting director Kim Winther, whose most recent credit is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
“It was a massive casting process — shout out Kim Winther,” he says. “But I actually really bonded with every single one of these people in this cast, and I’m very grateful for them to take a shot on a smaller movie with me.”
4 X 4: The Event does not have a release date. It Ends is in theaters on Aug. 21.