How “How It Ends” ends: badly, and not soon enough. How it begins is not much better, and has the added disadvantage of being even further from the end than the end. Everything in the middle is great, though! Just kidding. The middle is likely the worst part. “How It Ends,” directed by husband-and-wife team Daryl Wein (“Lola Versus,” “White Rabbit“) and Zoe Lister-Jones (“Band Aid“), who also stars, delivers almost precisely the film you might have feared in darker moments, way back at the beginning of this ungodly pandemic, that someone was going to think was a good idea: a wildly self-indulgent, toothcrackingly twee feature-length therapy session for people whose experiences during this period of isolation and alienation, contrary to the popular notion that we’re all going through much the same shit, are clearly so deeply, existentially different from yours that you end up feeling lonelier than ever.
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In bright, murderously cheerful colors, and breezy, almost insultingly sunny, palm-fringed photography (Wein again, at least making everything look scrumptious as an ice cream with a whimsical cherry on top), we’re introduced to Liza (Lister-Jones) on what we soon learn is the last day of life on earth. A meteor is going to hit, no negotiations, no last-minute “Armageddon“-style Hail Marys. She’s woken in the morning, dewy and tousled, by a girl (Cailee Spaeny, who is 23 but I think supposed to be playing way younger? Like, young enough for Liza to get uncomfortable when she talks about “fucking”?) rapping on her window and inserting herself scampishly into Liza’s morning. It involves— this being the last day and all— a stack of pancakes bigger than her head, and a plan to ignore her improbably cheerful friend’s party invitation, get stoned and welcome death alone.
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For indeed, she will be alone, because even if the girl is there —and you may have already noticed the youngster does bear a passing resemblance to Liza (Spaeny, though given a thankless task is a very appealing presence)— she “doesn’t count.” “You’re metaphysical,” eyerolls Liza, confirming your feeling of sinking dread and that the girl is, in fact, Liza’s younger self, heretofore visible only to Liza. Can it possibly be that Liza’s surly aloofness in the face of certain death has something to do with not loving herself enough? It can! And here’s a handy way to sky-write that healing process, in dialogues between herself and herself that could not be more on the nose if they were a random signpost the pair stumble across that reads “You Are Enough” and that Liza claims is “a little on the nose.”
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First, Liza and Liza go on a quest to get some weed because she’s run out, which is frankly bad planning considering everyone’s known the date of D-Day for quite some time. And after an encounter with a fellow self-medicating enthusiast (Nick Kroll), Liza runs into her ex, Nate (Logan Marshall-Green), a jaw-dropping hunk literally pictured carrying two puppies in slo-mo while voices go la-la-la on the soundtrack. (I don’t think Ryan Miller’s score actually does use any ukuleles, but it’s the kind of plinky piano and acoustic guitar you immediately remember as ukulele music). Liza broke Nate’s presumably perfectly sculpted heart back in the day because, despite their being in love and having “fireworks sex,” she “got scared” or something. Relatable! Anyway, he lets drop he’s going to The Party tonight (there is only one), and boom! Liza and Liza decide that rather than die puking and alone, they’re going to spend their last day Getting Closure with parents, exes, and estranged friends, before hooking up with Nate again. But oh no, someone has stolen her car, so the Lizas (the younger version is now visible to others for some reason) are going to have to hoof it across LA. Who knows who they might meet?
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Now look, I don’t want to have to think about this too much (I don’t want to have to think about it all, but I need the cash), but it seems to me if you’re going to all the trouble to make up a meteor strike as a world-ending event, you could probably spare five minutes or so to gin up a reason why no one, on the last day of their lives, even when seeing long-lost friends, family members or lifelong loves, ever actually touches each other. Why 90% of the encounters happen with one participant on their porch and the other bawling at them from a good four meters away on the sidewalk. Yes, we know it’s because the film was shot under Covid distancing regulations, but the people in the film do not. So each one of these increasingly empty and exhaustingly wacky encounters plays out like in a student film, in which no one can think of any way for two characters to meet except to run into each other on an otherwise completely deserted street and be all like “Hey Liza!” “Oh hey, Sal, the first guy I ever kissed who I haven’t seen in years and who is now a ‘climax therapist’ dressed in nothing but a red speedo! What’s up?”
But then, there are many ways that the co-writers display how little they care about creating a narrative framework that is anything more than a lame cover story for hanging out with a selection of famous buddies (three cast members from “Always Sunny,” Lamorne Morris from Lister-Jones’ “New Girl” stint – oh she was so great in “New Girl”! – Bradley Whitford, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Whitney Cummings, Olivia Wilde, Paul W.Downs, Colin Hanks, Ayo Edebiri, Sharon Von Etten, Bobby Lee, Pauly Shore.) Let’s not even get into all the films, like Don McKellar‘s great “Last Night,” Mimi Leder‘s perfectly acceptable “Deep Impact,” or even Lorene Scafaria‘s “Seeking a Friend For The End of the World” that have taken a similar premise and run with it, far, far in the opposite direction and ended up somewhere at least passingly interested in how impending extinction might actually psychologically affect recognizable human beings. “How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor. [D]
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