You should just watch I’m Thinking of Ending Things for yourself. You’ll either love it or hate it, but any purposeful talk about Charlie Kaufman’s latest film demands digging into its challenging narrative and describing its elaborate trail of reveals, confusion, and misinformation with some degree of depth. But every word I write and you read does a disservice to the experience… if you’re looking for a recommendation, please take mine, because I can’t stop thinking about this film.
Though there’s certainly a story being told, like the portraits referencing Ralph Albert Blakelock in the text, this film is all about eliciting emotion over plot. Like many of Kaufman’s pieces, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a head-scratching magnet becoming to many interpretations and ideas, but principally those concerning relationships and regret.
These themes are poetically inhabited by the film’s leads, a young woman and her boyfriend Jake. Though still in the very early stages of dating, Jake is taking his girlfriend to meet his parents at their barn in the snowy rural outskirts of Oklahoma. But something’s not right. As if in confirmation of the woman’s many nagging doubts, every sign in the universe appears to be telling her to follow through with her urge to end their relationship then and there.
The journey wraps around the drive down as Jake and his girlfriend spar in long bouts of dialogue, much of which is crammed with allusions to the arts, physical sciences, and everything in between. Paired with Kaufman’s lovely, eloquently written dialogue, the casual manner in which the couple reminisces and wanders through their encyclopedic knowledge makes the film constantly bubble with thoughts and substance to chew on. There are so, so many references that even the most learned scholar will likely miss a good chunk of them, and despite also serving as a way for Kaufman to thematically stream them through the film’s consciousness, that blatant inaccessibility is almost part of the film’s charm.
It won’t be for everyone, and many will be all too quick to dismiss the film as nonsense. But to a keen and eager eye—and I can’t stress this enough—I’m Thinking of Ending Things is simply interesting and never not that! For me, at least, it was a thorough and total pleasure to get lost in.
It’s all held together by Jessie Buckley, a charming wonder who gives so vibrant and natural a lead performance as the film’s young woman that words couldn’t do her justice. Jesse Plemons is also damn good as the deceptively complex Jake. Why? From here, for real, this time, stop reading if you haven’t seen the film.
Both actors deliver Kaufman’s tricky writing with a pinpoint perfection that doesn’t miss a beat, not even once time, space, and reality start to converge into the film’s characters (in that regard, high praise for the editor, as well!). While Buckley is the open-book, sardonic door that welcomes the film’s audience in, Plemons has just the right amount of off-putting earnestness to create an alienating tension between them.
This life-sucking give and take turns I’m Thinking of Ending Things into a deep-dive about the feelings of being eaten alive by a relationship, of the ever-encroaching flow of time pushing and trapping people into settling for the wrong person and a mundane life. It’s about the call to leave a dead-end relationship before it festers into stagnation, like the maggot-infested underbelly of an unkempt farm animal. As if in a manifestation of the ego’s cry of warning, Kaufman vets his complex vision by slyly pushing emotional buttons with his vaguely unsettling writing and directing, peppering the experience with an eerie sense of foreboding that manifests itself in sumptuous, pricking little details that don’t add up.
It’s convoluted and, at times, overwhelming—I wouldn’t blame you for drawing up a spreadsheet to organize all these mischievous particulars. I’ll admit, I took mild notes as I watched the film. But from that dense, elusive heap of dreamy storytelling and dialogue, Kaufman gives you all the tools you need to make out what he’s saying beneath the seeming artifice.
And it’s a gift that keeps giving because, like a thematic matryoshka,I’m Thinking of Ending Thingsblossoms into an entirely different beast just when you think you have a handle on it. The film works entirely in its own right as a piece observing an incompatible relationship from a young woman’s point of view, but as it unwinds into a hellish road trip into the abstract, it additionally becomes a dourly ironic exploration of a genius’ shackles to his family, town, and past.
Does it all implode on itself in its last stretch of minutes? Maybe? Kind of? Like an ever-shifting, puppeteering puzzle, it’s all there from the beginning, but the big, bigger, and biggest pictures don’t reveal themselves until Kaufman wants you to see them, and possibly still not even after that. The film almost insatiably asks for repeat viewings, and, as I hope you might be after watching it, I’ll be more than happy to oblige.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things beautifully bottles years of relationships and obsessions, regrets and fears into one brilliant package that refines and one-ups the novel it’s based on in every single way.
Grade: A-
★★★★★
90%
Fresh
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