Directed by: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
Rated R, 134 minutes
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” isn’t a horror film, but it has many of the trappings of one. A woman meets her boyfriend’s parents at their rural farmhouse and gets stuck there against her will. Her boyfriend mutters and seethes quietly, as if possessed by evil. His mother complains of hearing “whispers.” There is a dog, but we later learn he’s been dead the whole time. In one scene, a high school night janitor has a vision of a pig walking through the halls, its intestines being devoured by maggots, leaving behind a trail of blood.
Despite this ghostly atmosphere, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is anodyne. Over its two hours of unabashedly poetic filmmaking, the movie builds a slow-burning tension, but never pays it off. The characters are full of anxiety, doubt, and misplaced anger, but writer-director Charlie Kaufman (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) always changes the subject before we get any closure. The result is scattershot and unaffecting, even if individual moments are surprising and clever.
Borrowing in equal measure from the surreal and the absurd, Kaufman creates a universe that reflects characters’ interior lives more than their exterior ones. For instance, when the young woman (Jessie Buckley, “Wild Rose”) descends the stairs having the titular thoughts about her relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons, “The Irishman”), the staircase suddenly extends infinitely, looping upon itself and trapping her in a never-ending descent. While her internal monologue goes on, she keeps coming to the same landing over and over, only arriving downstairs when her thoughts have come to a conclusion. By allowing the young woman’s thoughts, rather than the length of the staircase, to dictate the timing of her movement from upstairs to downstairs, Kaufman illustrates both the repetitive nature of her thoughts and the capacity for film to represent time and space in nonlinear, nonliteral ways.
This is just one of many moments designed for analysis rather than impact. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is perhaps best understood as a showcase of Kaufman’s film theory bona fides, from a long discussion of John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” to a recital of a speech from “A Beautiful Mind,” and even a musical number from “Oklahoma!”—and that’s to say nothing of the interpretive dance sequence or the movie-within-the-movie (“Directed by Robert Zemeckis,” say its fake credits). This is a textbook example of a movie made by consulting textbooks. It’s exasperating.
This exasperation seems to be the point. After all, Jake is a gloomy know-it-all, completely undone by trivial matters. When his mother (Toni Collette, “Knives Out”) mistakenly calls Trivial Pursuit’s Genus Edition the “Genius Edition,” he slams his fists on the table. When a milkshake threatens to make the cup holder in his car sticky, he insists on taking a detour just to find a trash can. The young woman wonders how she ended up in a relationship with someone so insufferable, so incapable of seeing the forest for the trees.
She attributes it, ultimately, to the way women are conditioned not to say no to men. At its most incisive moments, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” explores the sexual and social politics behind the melancholia that hangs over its characters—the ageism and ableism against Jake’s parents, the sexism that has made the young woman’s path through life harder than it should have been—but Kaufman is usually too staid and professorial to truly engage with them. Once he’s gotten his filmmaking gimmickry out of his system, there’s little space left for these discussions. Accordingly, they pop up as afterthoughts and summaries that feel separate from the film that surrounds them.
The great irony of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is that Kaufman’s attention is so focused on the minutiae of his filmcraft that his production would be better suited to the stage. What with the many living room scenes, the climactic stage performance scene that caps the movie’s two-plus hours, and the story’s fluidity of time and space (a quality that the theater accommodates easily), one has to wonder why this exists as a movie at all. More than anything else, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is the unfortunate victim of a misapplied adaptation. Befitting its listless, frustrated characters, the movie is irritating and lifeless, full of meaning but devoid of feeling.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/11/20.