I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 

A young woman (Jessie Buckley) takes a road trip through the snow with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents’ farm despite her reservations about their relationship. Along the way, she weighs her desire to end the relationship against what she sees as Jake’s better qualities. Meanwhile, a lonely old high school janitor (Guy Boyd) makes his rounds, ignored by students who are enthusiastically rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma!

 

Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 adaptation of Ian Reid’s twisty psychological thriller isn’t the first time the writer/director took on difficult-to-adapt source material. But whereas his take on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief took on a life of its own (yielding the excellent Spike Jonze-helmed Adaptation), I’m Thinking of Ending Things hews more closely to the source material albeit with Kaufman’s strange, discomfiting, boldly imaginative stamp.

 

There’s little that can be said about this film’s plot without spoiling its surprises. Eschewing a conventional narrative structure, I’m Thinking of Ending Things instead offers a series of increasingly surreal set pieces (tense conversations in a car, an awkward family dinner, etc.) whose symbolism only becomes truly apparent toward the end. Kaufman revisits some of his favorite themes – fear of failure, loss of identity – while dishing out allusions to poetry, film criticism, science, and musical theatre. While that sounds like an esoteric slog, there’s plenty of tension here. The cinematography at times evokes a horror film while the deliberate disregard of continuity has a deeply unsettling effect.

 

Both of the film’s leads rise to the challenge of navigating viewers through the film’s ambiguities. Much as she did in season 4 of Fargo, the Irish Buckley boasts an impeccable American accent, and her increasingly skeptical inner monologue makes her an effective audience surrogate. The seemingly placid Plemons offers moments of bashful hurt and verge-of-snapping rage while a chameleon-like Toni Collette plays his mom as kind-hearted though a bit ditzy. Opposite her, David Thewlis is equally benevolently awkward/oblivious though his English accent seems out of place for a midwestern farmer.

 

Though less self-indulgent than Kaufman’s opus Synecdoche, New York, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a challenging and divisive film that will likely leave you feeling cold by the end. However, the strange detours it takes to reach that point may make it worth your while.