I finally watched The Endless today, which I found to be an alluring and beautiful piece of film-making. Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who also play the lead roles), The Endless is the third of their current triptych of Lovecraftian films, including Resolution - to which The Endless is a kind-of-sequel; indeed, for those who have seen the former movie, The Endless actually offers something by way of an explanation as to,what is going on in Resolution.
Whilst The Endless definitely qualifies as a Lovecraftian movie - dealing with vast and inexplicable forces surrounding a UFO commune - the apellation ‘Lovecraftian’ nonetheless requires some qualification in tjis instance: as with Resolution and Benson and Moorhead’s second film Spring (which I really consider to be more Machenesque), Lovecraftian elements of cosmic awe, time shifts, and the notion of monstrous transformations which hint at an alien heritage, are used in their movies as framing devices for exploring very human relationships: friendship, romantic love, and family. Certainly both The Endless and Spring tend to retreat from an explicit Lovecraftian nihilism in favour of the possibility of hope provided by meaningful, human, emotional attachments. In addition to which, viewers shouldn’t go into this expecting overt Lovecraftian horror by way of the teratologically fabulous elements of the Cthulhu mythos; rather, The Endless explores Lovecraftian themes in the far more allusive manner of The Colour Out of Space. In this respect, The Endless is perhaps constitutive of an emergent body of ‘post-traditional’ Lovecaftian film and literature whch, whilst playing in the Lovecraftian sandbox, no longer feels slavishly bound to its tired conventions.
One of the best Lovecaftian forms to come out in recent years.
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