I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

 Score: 4 / 5

"I'm thinking of ending things," the narrator repeats several times in the opening scene. The narrator is also the main character, played by Jessie Buckley, and she's sitting in a moving car. Amidst her not-quite stream of consciousness, including memory and hope, judgment and suggestion, her voiceover feels at once sad, bored, wistful. "I'm thinking of ending things," she repeats, seemingly contemplating dumping her boyfriend of six weeks, Jake, the man driving the car. He's taking her to meet his parents for the first time. On a farm. In a blizzard. It's not ideal. I'd think about ending things too, though by this point it's surely a little too late.

"I'm thinking of ending things," she says, framed by the window of the car and underscored by the sound effects of a whistling wind. The lengthy opening scene is entirely within the car. So is the third major movement of the film, when Jake and our narrator leave his parents' farm. These people spend a lot of time in the car and, thematically, get absolutely nowhere. They're trapped in the world of the film and by the film itself; the movie is shot in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio that feels unwelcome and uncomfortable in our days of big-ass-tv digital screenings. Her entrapment in these frames suggests another, darker meaning to her gerund thoughts: suicide. It helps that most of the shots are from outside the car windows, with the whistling wind and thick snowfall. It makes it that much harder to see their faces and hear their voices, which are the only things worth trying to see clearly. In fact, the first we see of the pair is the clearest we see them, in many ways. Things only get more cloudy, more strange from here.

"I'm thinking of ending things," but who is she? We never really know. Her name is, initially, Lucy, but it apparently changes when other people call her other names like Ames and Yvonne and she doesn't correct them. As Jake introduces her to his parents and their conversation develops, details of her life change from sentence to sentence, including how they met, her job, her past. She quotes poetry at length and, in one incredible scene I had to pause during to reference-check, imitates Pauline Kael while quoting her review of A Woman Under the Influence (a film in which that woman attempts suicide) as if she herself is creating the monologue. And she's not alone in this. Jake, played by Jesse Plemons, is apparently such a vapid man that he has essentially no character. Almost everything he says is a reference, a quote, or something he clearly lifted from another source.

Not long after they get to the farm and meet Jake's parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis), the film teeters close to psychological horror. In this haunted house of Americana, each time the parents -- who very much seem to have missed the memo they'd be receiving visitors -- leave the room and return, they jump to a different time in their lives. From dewy-eyed newlyweds to a couple on their deathbed, their aging follow no linear logic. By the time Jake and his girlfriend leave into a night repeatedly referred to as treacherous, we're fully engaged in an organized nightmare; the problem is, we have no access to the organization of it.

And that's really writer/director Charlie Kaufman's modus operandi. But unlike his other films, i'm thinking of ending things is almost inaccessible in its opaque artistry, its tedious dialogue that would require a reference appendix, its bizarre obsession with -- typical for the creator -- an utterly unlikable and deeply introverted man in the throes of agony simply because he's alive and can't cope. Here, I'd argue (based on the conclusion, which I'd rather not spoil but may need to), his main character is in fact much more fascinating than in Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, but then we'd have to discuss the issue of dramatizing mental illness in this way and with this very specific ending. It just gave me the willies, and not in a juicy frisson but in a guilt-ridden way. "I'm thinking of ending things" might be Kaufman's way of trying to end our understanding of his movies.

Of course, I'm sure a repeat viewing would help, especially now that I have a few notes of specific references these characters make. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to watch this hypnotic, bewildering movie again any time soon. It certainly doesn't help that it premiered on Netflix; this kind of experience needs to be seen in a blackened auditorium with absolutely no distractions. Netflix fare has to compete with all manner of food, cell phone conversations, family members interjecting, bathroom breaks ad nauseam, and to combat the soporific comfort of a viewer's bed or sofa and ambient lighting. I'd be surprised if this movie garners many fans, much like the beautiful and haunting I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Then again, Kaufman's work here is clearly a labor of love, and one that manages, despite its unfathomable ambiguities, to carry us along with it by sheer virtue of his control of the craft.

If you've seen it, or read the novel on which it is loosely based, let's have a conversation about it. I'm not at all convinced my interpretation holds all of the water. I'm not sure any interpretation would. I guess that's good, but it's also dreadfully dull in context of this movie. I guess I'd rather end things too.