83 min | R | July 20, 2021 | American International Pictures
A comet is hours from ending the world, so Liza walks across Los Angeles to reach one last party and say her goodbyes. Her younger self tags along to force the honesty she has dodged for decades. It is a sweet end-of-the-world hangout that keeps saying goodbye and never builds to anything.
Liza wakes up on the last day before a comet ends the world. She has hours to kill and a final party to reach across Los Angeles. She walks the city on foot, accompanied by a physical manifestation of her younger self. The two of them visit ex-boyfriends, estranged parents, and old friends so Liza can settle accounts before the sky falls. How It Ends uses the apocalypse as a deadline for the conversations people spend their whole lives avoiding. The real subject is self-forgiveness and the gap between the person you were and the person you became.
Zoe Lister-Jones plays Liza as a woman who has rehearsed her regrets so long they sound like jokes. Cailee Spaeny plays Young Liza with an eagerness that keeps pushing the older version toward honesty. The two performances work as a single argument between past and present. Nick Kroll turns Gary into a stoned dealer who treats the end of the world as a minor inconvenience. Tawny Newsome gives Celine a warmth that breaks through Liza’s defensive sarcasm. Finn Wolfhard and Whitney Cummings pass through as Ezra and Mandy in encounters that land and then evaporate.
Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones direct and write the film as a series of one-on-one encounters strung along a single walk. The conditions of the shoot are visible in every frame. Characters stay spaced apart on empty sidewalks and sunlit streets, and the camera holds them in wide two-shots that make distance the visual grammar. The natural light and exterior locations give the film a loose, improvised texture. The episodic structure is both the method and the limit. Each vignette resets the emotional stakes, and the momentum never accumulates into a single story.
How It Ends works best as a collection of small farewells rather than a building drama. The premise gives every scene a clock, but the structure keeps starting over. The charm is real and the cameos are sharp. What the film lacks is escalation. It covers the same emotional distance in its final minutes that it covers in its first, and the apocalypse becomes a mood instead of a stake.