Directors/Screenplay/Producers – Zoe Lister-Jones & Daryl Wein, Photography – Tyler Beus & Daryl Wein, Music – Ryan Miller, Visual Effects – Jeff Desom & Todd Leykamp. Production Company – Mister Lister Films.
Cast
Zoe Lister-Jones (Liza), Cailee Spaeny (Young Liza), Logan Marshall Green (Nate), Olivia Wilde (Alay), Nick Kroll (Gary), Lamorne Morris (Larry), Bradley Whitford (Kenny), Helen Hunt (Lucinda), Fred Armisen (Manny), Sharon Van Etten (Jet), Colin Hanks (Charlie), Whitney Cummings (Mandy), Tawny Newsome (Celine), Bobby Lee (Derek), Glenn Howerton (John), Paul W. Downs (Sal Benedetti), Charlie Day (Lonny), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (Krista), Ayo Edibiri (Stand Up), Angelique Cabral (Diaz), Rob Hubel (Joe), Paul Scheer (Dave), Pauly Shore (Himself), Finn Wolfhard (Ezra)
Plot
It is the last day of the world. A comet is due to strike the Earth at 2am. Liza and her imaginary Younger Self set out across Los Angeles, intending to reconnect, apologise to or speak her mind to her parents, friends and various exes. Liza’s car has been stolen so they have to travel on foot. Along the way, they encounter a colourful assortment of eccentrics.
Zoe Lister-Jones has been around since the early 2000s and appeared as an actress in a reasonable body of films and tv. She began co-writing and appearing in films directed by Daryl Wein with Breaking Upwards (2009), Lola Versus (2012) and Consumed (2015), with the two of them marrying during the course of this. Zoe later made her directorial debut with Band Aid (2017). Her most high-profile work was directing The Craft: Legacy (2020) for Blumhouse, while she has also created the parallel universe tv series Slip (2023).
Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein shot How It Ends together during the Covid Pandemic lockdown of 2020. The film essentially consists of Zoe and Cailee Spaeny wandering the streets of Los Angeles encountering various eccentrics and oddballs. These include everyone from Zoe’s ex Logan Marshall Green where she dreams of getting back together with him; where she visits and reconciles with old friend Olivia Wilde; confronts her ex Lamorne Morris; encounters and accompanies singer Sharon Van Etten who is performing in the middle of the street; meets Colin Hanks who is creating a treasure hunt for his girlfriend; meets Ayo Edibiri as a teacher who has decided to perform stand-up in the middle of the street; comes across Rob Hubel and Paul Scheer as neighbours arguing over putting the trash out in an environmentally responsible way on the last day of the world; goes at various points to meet both of her parents (Bradley Whitford and Helen Hunt); and attends a party replete with an appearance from Pauly Shore playing himself.
How It Ends is loose and often seems to be improvisational. The Covid lockdown appears to have given Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein greater freedom than they would have had if they were shooting at any other time – they are able to frequently shoot scenes with Zoe and Cailee walking down the middle of the street uninterrupted by vehicles. In many cases, the interactions with the other actors are shot socially distanced. Some of the encounters have an appealing quirkiness – like where Zoe visits old friend Olivia Wilde and the two simultaneously talk over each other and then say how they were happy to have listened to the other. The funniest sequence is where Zoe goes to confront her ex Lamorne Morris over his unfaithfulness with various women and men, while Angelique Cabral as another of his women turns up in in the midst to say her piece.
Zoe Lister Jones (r) (also the film’s co-director/co-writer) and her Young Self (Cailee Spaeny) (l) cross Los Angeles on foot
It is worth comparing How It Ends to other films on the subject of The End of the World such as Last Night (1998), 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011) and These Final Hours (2013). Where these others take in the social collapse and dissolution of law and order, or depict people desperate to connect and find some meaning in the last few hours they have, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein’s approach is far more amiable and comic. In fact, here there is no sense of the world falling apart and society collapsing and everyone seems cooperative and easygoing. At most this seems a film about one woman’s genteel journey to come to terms with being happy with herself. At which How It Ends arrives at its end quite likeably.
One of the more appealing aspects of the film is that the two lead characters consist of Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny playing her Younger Self, which makes this into an Imaginary Companion film. One of the quirkier touches is that everyone can see Cailee and is often asking Zoe who her young friend is. At one point during their journey, they stop and have a conversation with Manny (Fred Armisen) who plays the younger self of an elderly man (whom we never meet). This is given some handwave explanation about being an effect created by the nearing comet.
How It Ends should not be confused with the also worthwhile How It Ends (2018) with Theo James and Forest Whitaker on a road journey across a countryside where society is in a state of collapses due to an unspecified catastrophe.
