Charlie Kaufman is back with I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a psychological horror charting a doomed relationship, and an adaptation of Ian Reid's 2016 novel . It follows Jessie Buckley as a young woman who's Thinking of Ending Things with Jake (Jesse Plemons), her pleasant, if slightly eccentric boyfriend. That she's considering this en route to his parents' house before she meets them for the first time is just the start of what promises to be a long, strange night. A new Kaufman project is always cause for celebration, not just because of their scarcity, but because every script he pens (in this case for the screen) is its own kind of puzzle box, every detail simultaneously elusive and yet impossible to resist interrogating.
It goes without saying that this film won't work for everyone, especially as it delves further and further into the surreal. The truth is that it's psychological horror at its most literal, which is to say it's a film about the terror of human consciousness. Kaufman substitutes shocks and scares for contradictions and inconsistencies, forcing the viewer to doubt every detail that the film makes a point of establishing. Again, it's bound to weed out the impatient, but part of this film's charm is that steadily building discomfort, difficult to watch but much harder not to. This is made even better by the film's queasy sense of humour, which is so paralyzingly unfunny that it makes every moment that much harder to bear.
It's hardly a stretch for Kaufman stylistically or thematically, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Every film he makes feels like he's tunneling further into his own psyche; Eternal Sunshine dissected an imploding relationship and Anomalisa portrayed a character lost in the fog of their own waning grip on reality, but I'm Thinking of Ending Things feels like the point in his filmography where all of his pet themes are starting to blend into one gorgeously bleak idea. He's doubling down on the things that make him such a unique storyteller, and if the result is hard to understand then I think that's kind of the point. Suggesting that any of these images or ideas has any one meaning just doesn't feel right, and yet they're done with so much nuance that two people could argue for days about any of them (the pig, the dog, the ice-cream) and both of them could be correct on some level. It's a film that invites discussion and dissection and it's likely that, in years to come, we'll still be arguing about what any of the symbolism means.
In fact, if I had one reservation with I'm Thinking of Ending Things, it's that Kaufman goes too abstract on the home stretch. No spoilers, but the last 30 minutes sees a change in the story's focal point, so that instead of being about one character, it really turns out to have been exploring someone else the whole time. The issue is that, in doing this, the film relies heavily on surreal imagery and dream logic, but with much less of a tether to reality as before. The probelm isn't that it doesn't make sense- that goes with the territory- but that it doesn't feel as narratively consistent with the film that preceded it.
There's such a notable shift in direction without enough time to properly develop it or make it feel that it has any sort of bearing on everything that was set up so well. If anything, maybe it's too clever, going so deep into the psychological that it feels at odds with the slow, sustained build of tension from before. Maybe the best comparison would be Eraserhead, another film that ventures so far into the world of dreams that applying any sort of rational thought to it just feels futile.
But again, that's perhaps to be expected from one of the most cerebral and challenging filmmakers working today. The beauty of I'm Thinking of Ending Things is in how abstract it is. It is frustrating, it is inconsistent and it doesn't need to make sense to get its point across. Maybe I'd have preferred the narrative inconsistencies and slowly escalating dread to continue through the entire runtime instead of a sudden, incredibly dense barrage of symbolism in the last ten minutes, but up to that point, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is by far one of the year's standouts. I'll admit, I loved the film but hated the experience of watching it, but that feels like the point. It's pure thought translated into cinema, and even if it trips up slightly in its home stretch, there's more than enough meaning packed into it to keep it from missing the mark. It's a really interesting piece of work that's at its best when it lets these long, often contradictory scenes of dialogue just play out, with a good part of the film's midsection being some of the most thrilling scenes of the year. I've only seen it once, and maybe I'd benefit from a revisit, but I can't help but feel that's intentional too, like the film burrows into your subconscious and grows with every subsequent rewatch. And if that's the case, I can't wait to see my thoughts develop over time
★ ★ ★ ★
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