Mark Reviews Movies: I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 3, 2020

On an initial viewing, I'm Thinking of Ending Things plays as a surrealist comedy, full of existential dread about identity, unhappy relationships, uncertainty about one's place and role in one's own life and the world at large, aging, illnesses of the body and the brain, and death, as well as some slightly less depressing stuff, such as the role pieces of art/entertainment play in society and, well, surely there's some other less severe material in here. Let's go with the purpose, utility, and worth of buying ice cream while on a road trip in the middle of a blizzard.

The point is that writer/director Charlie Kaufman's film is not one to approach lightly—and certainly not one to go to with any sort of expectations in mind. It is, at its core, a despairing portrait of a young woman who, feeling certain that her relationships with a new-ish boyfriend is destined to fail, spends a lengthy trip to his childhood home debating the idea of dumping him.

The guy seems nice enough, and even she admits that. Something's wrong, though—with him, with the trip, with the house, with its occupants, with the way she ultimately perceives time or, as she later theorizes, the way time moves through her.

There is an answer to all of this apparent absurdity, which paints the entirety of this story in a wholly different and hopelessly melancholy light. The real achievement, though, is how engaging Kaufman's screenplay, based on a novel Iain Reid, remains, despite our capacity to only intuit some of what the film's final purpose is.

We can see and hear that things aren't as they seem, and while the mind races to make any kind of sense of the characters' shifting thoughts and moods and identities and ages, we still can feel the cold, sad truth of whatever is beneath all of these various oddities. When the truth does finally arrive, in an extended sequence that somehow becomes even more surreal than everything before it, the revelation packs an uncompromisingly honest punch.

Well before any of that, though, we meet a woman who is introduced as Lucy (Jessie Buckley). She's waiting for her boyfriend, while narrating events of a road trip that are about to unfold against the backdrop of assorted styles of floral wallpaper that she has yet to encounter in a farmhouse.

An older man, who makes occasional appearances (In an ingenious move, the intercutting here lets us know his identity, without giving away what has happened to him), lives there, we presume, and as he looks out his window, Lucy seems to sense him, despite the fact that she's standing on a street in a town—nowhere near any kind of farm. Jake (Jesse Plemons), the boyfriend she has been dating for either a month or six to seven weeks (She admits she should probably figure out the timing), arrives, all smiles, excitement, and ignorance of what's going on inside her head—or so we think.

"I'm thinking of ending things," Lucy's mind blurts out when the couple is on the road. Jake seems to hear it. He asks what she said, but Lucy said nothing aloud. As her internal monologue goes on and on about the question of dumping Jake or just letting things progress, as unhappy as she believes she is or suspects she will be, Jake continually interrupts the thoughts. Can he hear her? Does he simply assume, from her mood or his past experience in relationships, that thoughts about him, specifically about ending the relationship with him, are on her mind?

There is no real plot of which to speak here. The story progresses through a series of four or five sequences or movements, if one wants to put it more musical terms to denote the change in rhythm and tone (which, since everything is so intentionally jumbled in terms of characters and time and space, are the main qualities on which to latch).

The first is that car ride to Jake's childhood home, where he plans to introduce Lucy to his parents. The ride, confined to the car with the light snow falling upon the lonely landscape surrounding them, is filled with her thoughts, with Jake's attempts to be a curious and attentive boyfriend, and the initial hints that something isn't right with anything. At first, Lucy is studying medicine, with no interest in metaphor. Soon after, she's a poet, reciting one of her recent compositions. As the film proceeds, she will go through various hobbies and occupations, as well as names (Louisa, Lucia, and even Amy).

The second sequence takes place at the farmhouse, where Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) make a big fuss over their son's girlfriend. To Jake's increasing frustration, his mother constantly brags about him, too. The family dog seems to appear out of nowhere upon mention, only to disappear as soon as interest in the animal fades.

The night goes on, and time itself seems to lose any meaning. The mother and father age or become more youthful from scene to scene, and Lucy or Louisa or Lucia or even Amy has gone through so many shifts of identity—which no one, even her, acknowledges—that there's no way to tell who she actually is at a certain point.

Buckley's performance is quite astonishing in how she provides a set, sympathetic foundation of personality to go along with a character whose very existence and consciousness eventually becomes a question. Plemons, too, is great, although the tricky nature of his performance only becomes clear in retrospect.

There are so many mysteries, both big and small, throughout this film. Kaufman wants us to dig, perhaps, but more to the point, he wants us to feel the doubts, the anguish, the confusion, the absence of logic, and the dread of the unknown, the remembered, and the forgotten. It's a rather daring act of trust—that we will accept but be skeptical of what we see, attaching to the emotional core of what unfolds, without trying to dissect all of the visual hints and clues Kaufman lays out right in front of us.

Fortunately, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is so darkly funny, so imaginative, and so skillfully constructed that feeling its effect is just a matter of giving in to it. That's on a first viewing, at least. On a second, we know which question to ask from the start: Whose story is this, anyway? The answer paints the entire experience as a tragedy.

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