Being Charlie Kaufman: "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" a strange, challenging, perplexing paradox

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Idiosyncratic filmmaker Charlie Kaufman (2015’s “Anomalisa”) is one of a kind — not for everyone but certainly singular and pure of vision. With the auteur’s latest, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” this is an adaptation of a horror-tinged 2016 novel by Ian Reid but unmistakably Kaufman and probably his most esoteric between the source material and his already-abstract sensibilities. Kaufman’s first film in five years is at once strange, maddening, challenging, literate, unpredictable and abstruse, a paradoxical wonder of a mind-bending black comedy and existential nightmare. As perplexing and unclassifiable a film as one will see this year or any year, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” refuses to follow any formal, linear rules and demands a lot of effort (and depends on an intellectual and cultural frame of reference) from the viewer.

A young woman (Jessie Buckley)—whose ever-fickle name might be “Lucy,” “Louisa,” “Lucia,” or “Ames”—is invited by her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), after six weeks of dating to meet his parents and have dinner in their remote Oklahoma farmhouse. It’s their first road trip together, but one new thought keeps repeating itself: she is thinking of ending things with Jake. It’s the first snowfall of the season, and before the couple even arrives at Jake’s parents’ house, she keeps reminding him that she needs to work early in the morning as if to not stay too late. To say that his mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) are eccentric would be an understatement, but the nightmare still continues after they leave. Throughout the film—on a different plane in time—we check in on an older man (Guy Boyd), who seems to now be living in Jake’s house with the same floral wallpaper, going about his mundane day as a forlorn janitor at the local high school.

Written for the screen and directed by Charlie Kaufman, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is like a puzzle box that, as intriguingly cryptic as it can be, may never be fully unlocked, unless by its creator. Merely on the surface, it has the deceptively simple setup of a bizarre horror film, which it is not, at least not in a traditional sense. Truly weird on even David Lynch’s weirdest day, this is more of a meditation on regret, aging, memory, and identity than a Kaufman-esque take on “The Twilight Zone” or “Twin Peaks.” As the title goes, the Young Woman in her inner stream-of-consciousness voice-over is deciding on ending her relationship, but there is also an existential doom that begins to hover over her and Jake to mean the decision of ending a life. 

As a whole, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is less than the sum of its parts. On a moment-to-moment basis, the film is wonderfully quirky and sharply funny, surreal and sometimes even heartbreaking. The big centerpiece is a discomfiting, humorously prickly meeting and dinner with Jake’s parents that becomes a kind of time vortex. Something already feels off before Jake and his girlfriend even enter his parents' house, his mother waving at them from an upstairs window excitedly and endlessly. Once Jake's parents actually come downstairs, everything keeps changing and contradicting itself on a dime, sometimes within the same scene. The profession of Jake’s girlfriend is never the same; she is a physicist at first, but then she’s a poet, a painter, and a waitress. Jake’s parents seem to get older with a new ailment as the night goes on, until Mom shows up as a June Cleaver-type housewife. The tension rises, too, as Jake gets annoyed whenever his mother confuses the word “genus” for “genius” and mispronounces “physics.” Taken individually, other moments click in their amusement and Lynchian dread, like a fake romantic comedy directed by Robert Zemeckis playing in one scene or a stop in the middle of a blizzard at ice cream stand Tulsey Town. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal (2018’s “Cold War”) lenses the intimate production with precision and grey melancholy, imagery as imaginative as it is hauntingly lonesome. As logical as a dream, there is a beautifully hypnotic and indescribably poetic seven-minute sequence of interpretative ballet in a high school hallway that continues into a gymnasium.

Passing as Sally Hawkins’ younger sister, Jessie Buckley (2019’s “Wild Rose”) is superb as the Young Woman, who might be more of an idea than a real person, not to mention the most unreliable of narrators. After dinner, she who might be Lucy becomes the pearl-wearing Louisa who keeps receiving phone calls from Lucy. At one point in the blink of an eye, Buckley gets replaced by another actress. Is this her story, or Jake’s story? Or neither? Either way, Buckley and a touchingly understated Jesse Plemons make her and Jake’s verbal acrobatics during the dialogue-heavy scenes on their drive quite engaging. They cite David Foster Wallace and Broadway shows (particularly "Oklahoma!"), and discuss the rape subtext in Christmas tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Inspired by Pauline Kael, a breathlessly vitriolic review of “A Woman Under the Influence” and Gena Rowland’s performance is rivetingly performed by Buckley with a lit cigarette suddenly between her fingers. As Jake's furiously aging parents, Toni Collette and David Thewlis are deliberately mannered and heightened but interesting in a way that’s eerily off-kilter.

An enigmatic journey through one's lifelong dream that could mean anything, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” challenges, amuses, disconcerts, baffles, and ultimately just washes over you. It could be brilliant, it could be highfalutin, or it could be both. Some films can reward in the end, giving the viewer a lot to take away, but this is one of those times where being placed at arm’s length and scratching one’s head is closer to the end result. There might be more to decode and parse with repeat viewings because Charlie Kaufman stubbornly doesn’t provide any easy answers and seems to have made it for himself. Too audacious and richly designed to outright dismiss but too precious to completely embrace, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” does get one thinking they are having an existential crisis. Come to think of it, that feeling might be playing right into Kaufman’s hand. 

Grade: B -

Netflix will release "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" (133 min.) for streaming on September 4, 2020.