This Review of "I’m Thinking of Ending Things" Is An Eternal Nightmare of the Plotless Kind

We’re trying to describe this Charlie Kaufman movie without spoiling it. Pray for us.

Is a film review meant to be a recommendation or an explanation? Maybe sometimes it’s meant to be a warning.

I suppose it depends on the reader and when they come to it. It certainly depends on the movie and the moviemaker. This time we’re talking about I’m Thinking of Ending Things and its writer-director Charlie Kaufman, of the mind-bending scripts to Spike Jonze joints Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the self-directed Synecodche, New York and Anomalisa. After reading those titles alone, you’re either all in or already gone. Consider this your first exit point. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is now streaming on Netflix. Bye!

Everyone else: His latest is based on a novel by Iain Reid from 2016, though it turns out knowing what happens in the book is as helpful as a roadmap in a snowstorm: basically it’s just there to make you feel like you had a plan going in, but ultimately irrelevant to getting through this alive.

I could spend my review describing what happens in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, so that you might decide to seek it out on Netflix, where so many great features have been lost to its giant maw. The problem is the movie cannot be discussed thoughtfully, or even superficially, without digging into spoiler territory: the slow burn reveal of what is intimated by the opening scene. The movie itself is the spoiler. Why would you watch if you knew what awaited you? You see my predicament.

If you’ve already seen the flick and want confirmation of your interpretation or need help untangling it, my explanation is here. I’ll instead channel the rest of my energy into getting those who haven't to hit 'play', while dancing around the details, which may be a herculean feat on its own. I’m even willing to let you leave now and just say I’ll be giving this 4.5/5 at the end. See, I’d sooner spoil my review than your viewing experience. Bye!

Sticking around? Huh. Well okay, let’s see if we can navigate this terrain safely.

The picture stars Jessie Buckley as a young woman who goes unnamed throughout the feature for reasons that, again, I really can’t get into. She’s journeying with her boyfriend of only a few weeks, Jake (Jesse Plemons), to meet his parents, on a road trip to their family farmhouse that will take either a few hours or potentially years. They pass time talking about philosophy and poetry; all the while her internal monologue rumbles, "I’m thinking of ending things," wondering when, how or if she should break off the relationship. They eventually arrive and meet his parents, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, where things are… not right. Events happen. Later, they head home. We sometimes cut to a janitor at a nearby school doing menial work. Describing this all without spoilers feels like I’m counter-intuitively dissuading you from watching. It’s a bit like simply saying, "Parasite is about basement renovation."

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things Explained (and Why It Makes Sense for Charlie Kaufman)

I’ll relent and reveal that many of the "events" and "things" that occur in I’m Thinking of Ending Things are of the extremely WTF variety, with characters’ appearances, circumstances and states of health oscillating wildly, often within the same scene. I’ll even go so far as to add that there is conflict, a climax and, more often than not, moments of drama. And I really hate to bend my own rules, but I will confirm that, yes, there are 24 frames in each second of film. You're really twisting my arm though.

If you’ve read Reid’s book, you at least kinda know what you’re getting yourself into. Reid, however, let the oddities in this story accumulate, leading us down a path that slowly built pit-of-the-stomach dread. Kaufman doesn’t hide the oddities—he can’t, because what a book would otherwise leave to your mind's eye needs to be filled in for a visual form—so from the get-go we understand things are not going to end well for this couple. It’s all in the telling. And more than ever before in his career, Kaufman proves himself to be a director of immense talent, not simply a writer of boundless imagination.

His maddeningly funny, sometimes scary script occasionally goes on even stranger digressions than Reid did, or pulls from evocative poems such as Eva H.D.’s jarring "Bonedog" or, a couple times, the musical Oklahoma. However, he mostly lets the images speak for themselves, within a square 4:3 aspect ratio that purposefully keeps the characters from sharing a two-shot, leaving them isolated in their little boxes. He and cinematographer Łukasz Żal (who also went boxy with Cold War and Ida) craft unforgettable moments, like Buckley peering back through the car window and into the camera. Jay Wadley’s complementary atmospheric score sometimes runs in reverse—putting Tenet to shame—playing with time the way the characters begin to experience it. These combine for a disorienting ride that is powerful and haunting, all while being baffling. It’s, y’know, the vibe of the thing.

What does it amount to? What does it all mean? How is it a treatise on the art of writing, the futility of relationships and the all-too-human foible of personal recontextualisation? I really don’t want to say here (but I will say it here). What I will say is that Buckley is excellent in the lead role, her constant cocked half-smile deployed to appear both confused and in on the movie’s cosmic joke. Plemons—looking a lot like the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman (for a parallel to Synecdoche that may or may not be intentional)—is compelling too, his Jake either intriguingly malevolent or just plain awkward or both. And Collette and Thewlis are fantastic as the deranged parents whose grip on reality is really more of a light caress. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not for all tastes, and may not satisfy audiences who aren’t down to clown, but if any of the keywords from this painfully oblique review have tantalised you, this is a motion picture you may be daring enough to tackle. And hey, if you got this far without pulling your hair out in frustration, we know you’ve got the patience for it. Bye!

4.5/5

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is now available to stream on Netflix. Rated M for coarse language, mature themes, sexual references.

Header Image: Netflix