Josh Reviews I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Charlie Kaufman is a fantastically talented writer; he came to prominence by writing Being John Malkovich, and he’s written some of my all-time favorite films, including Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.  Mr. Kaufman wrote and directed 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, which was as gloriously weird as I’d come to expect from the films he’d written, but which, for me, didn’t hang together as well as those other films I’d mentioned.  Then came 2015’s animated Anomalisa, which is wonderful and weird and sad and truly must be seen to be believed.  Mr. Kaufman wrote and directed I’m Thinking of Ending Things in 2020 for Netflix.  (It’s an adaptation of the novel by Iain Reid.)  I’ve been meaning to watch it forever.  The dour-sounding title gave me pause, but I finally found the time to watch this film last month.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things introduces us to a young woman, Lucy (Jessie Buckley) on a long car ride, traveling to meet the parents of her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), who live at a remote farmhouse.  Lucy seems excited for the trip when we first meet her, but we’re only a few minutes into the film when we learn through her internal monologue that she’s considering breaking up with the somewhat strange, awkward Jake.  The two make it to Jake’s family’s house, where an escalating bizarre dinner ensues… and things get weirder from there.

This is a truly bizarre film.  Intellectually I respect what Mr. Kaufman has set out to do, and the cast is fantastic.  But I must confess that I found this film difficult to get through.  Both Lucy and Jake seem to be disturbed, albeit in different ways; it’s difficult to watch the two of them spiral for most of the film’s run-time.  And in contrast to the amazing films I listed at the start of this review, in which the story’s weirdness was playful and enjoyable to try to unravel as a viewer, I found I’m Thinking of Ending Things to be almost impenetrable.  (In this respect I feel similarly to how I feel about Synecdoche, New York, in which the film’s story was so perplexing that I often wasn’t able to quite make sense of it; whereas in Mr. Kaufman’s earlier films, all the puzzle pieces fit together so beautifully by the end.)

What I could decipher about this film’s ending left me upset.  This is hard to discuss without spoiling the ending.  So I’m putting up a huge SPOILER warning for this paragraph.  OK?  Don’t keep reading if you want to go into this movie knowing nothing.  Still here?  OK, so in the end, I think we’re meant to understand that the young woman played by Jessie Buckley (she’s called Lucy at the start of the film, but is then referred to by several different names), never existed.  This woman we’ve been following is an elderly Jake’s imagining of what a woman he met at a trivia night but didn’t have the courage to ask out might be like.  Aarghh, I hate that ending.  I spent the film’s two-plus hours enjoying the performance of Jessie Buckley — the film seemed to me to be her story, not Jake’s.  We spent a lot of time inside this young woman’s head, through her extensive internal monologue.  This was the character I’d invested in and was rooting for.  To then have the rug pulled out from under us as an audience, and to discover that this was actually Jake’s story and this woman was just his invention, was upsetting and disappointing.  It felt like a storytelling betrayal, and additionally I don’t like the sexual politics of it, as this young woman is revealed to have zero agency.  She literally doesn’t exist, and what we’ve been watching was the man’s story the whole time.  Blech.  I don’t care for that at all.

I wasn’t familiar with Jessie Buckley’s work before this, but she is phenomenal here.  She creates a fascinating character in the film; gradually peeling back the curtain and showing us the cracks and fragility within.  She commands the screen.  I was impressed; even more so when Ms. Buckley is called upon to morph this character into someone different.  This happens several times in the film.  At one point, she basically becomes Pauline Kael!  (Why this happens is too complicated to explain here.)  Ms. Buckley is fantastic taking those sharp turns and still holding this young woman together as a cohesive character who I like and was invested in.

Jesse Plemons has played a lot of creeps and weirdos (most notably on Breaking Bad), and he throws another log on that particular fire with Jake.  Jake is intelligent, but very intense and prone to bizarre outbursts.  Jake is scary and at times despicable, but Mr. Plemons’ intensity kept my attention glued to his character throughout the film.  Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine, The Way Way Back, Nightmare Alley) and David Thewlis (Wonder Woman, Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films) are wonderful as Jake’s parents.  Both play these roles so well; they’re creepy and bizarre but also each likable and interesting in their own weird ways.  That’s a tough balance, and they both walk it well.  We get to see those two at a variety of ages, and Ms. Collette and Mr. Thewlis both do a great job at crafting these slightly different versions of the characters.

As I’d expected from a Charlie Kaufman film, there are a number of entertainingly unexpected and strange twists and turns in the story, particularly in the film’s second half.  The animated talking pig voiced by Oliver Platt was a highlight for me, as was the beautifully realized, and gloriously strange, sequence in which suddenly several characters are dancing ballet through an abandoned old school building.  That was the most memorable sequence in the film for me.

I wish the film’s threads came together in a way that I found more satisfying.  Between that and the film’s generally unhappy, dark tone, this one didn’t work for me.

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