i'm thinking of ending things book movie review

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I’m thinking of reviewing things. Well, just one thing I guess, a new Netflix film called “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” that either requires a great deal of thinking, or maybe none at all.

I’m thinking it’s a film that defies simple classification. It’s a work with a tone that’s best conveyed by mentioning the other work of its director, Charlie Kaufman . Like Kaufman’s “ Being John Malkovich ,” “ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ,” and “ Synecdoche, New York ,” this adaptation of Iain Reid ’s acclaimed novel takes a surreal approach to its analysis of the human condition. What’s it about ? Well, it’s the simple story of a woman who goes to meet her new boyfriend’s parents on a snowy day that turns into a dangerous night because of the weather. That’s it really on the surface. But no Kaufman movie thrives on the surface.

The trip to a remote farmhouse is just the narrative skeleton on which Kaufman hangs arguably his most challenging film to date, a piece that verges on Lynchian in its surreal register, moving back and forth between reality and a dreamlike commentary on connection, although there may be even less of the former than it first appears. In a sense, all of Kaufman’s films have been about connection, but this one feels different in that it doesn’t have people pushing through this world in an effort to connect as much as realizing that they just can’t. There’s a line early in the film that haunted me throughout the next nearly two hours: “Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot. So they invented hope.” “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is about human constructions like hope, happiness, connection, and even time. I’m thinking that description probably doesn’t help you.

I’m thinking I should start at the beginning. The great Jessie Buckley (“ Wild Rose ”) plays a woman whose name changes multiple times throughout the film. She may be Yvonne. She may be Lucy. She may not even be there? Over time, more aspects of her biography seem to shift and be rewritten, including her background and profession. She quotes poetry as if she wrote it and even lifts part of a Pauline Kael review wholesale when arguing a film's quality. Whoever she is, she narrates the story and begins that narration, which is pretty loyal to the book, by repeating the title multiple times. What exactly she means by “ending” isn’t clear. Is it suicide? Kaufman peppers in references that fuel this reading, including a conversation about David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide, and the aforementioned Kael-scripted argument over the quality of “ A Woman Under the Influence ,” in which the title character attempts suicide. Or could it be another kind of ending? Maybe an ending to the relationship with Jake ( Jesse Plemons ), with whom she is traveling to meet his parents? Maybe an ending to the way she sees the world? Maybe an ending to the way you do?

The opening scenes of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” feel relatively straightforward, but even there Kaufman peppers in disorienting film techniques. While the woman narrates the story, which at first seems to be blending both her inner monologue with what’s happening, the film cuts to a high school janitor who seems to have no connection to our young couple. Why? Does she know him? How is he involved?

A sense of anxiety over the trip begins to rise, amplified by a tight 4:3 aspect ratio courtesy of Lukasz Zal (" Cold War ") that forces the viewer to pay more attention to what's in frame and even to consider what's missing. Kaufman is playing with space and time before it’s even obvious. He regularly films scenes in the car between Jake and his girlfriend from the outside, blurring their faces with snow and filling the sound mix with wind. Something is just off as these people become less clear instead of more. Plemons and Buckley are both absolutely phenomenal here, finding relatable character beats within a script that would have stymied other performers, conveying a growing anxiety without resorting to cheap tricks to highlight it.

The feeling of an active panic attack amplifies at Jake’s family home. First, his parents take so long to come downstairs that the woman wonders if they even knew they were coming. When they do, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis , they seem friendly enough, honestly eager to hear stories of how these two young lovebirds met, but Jake is consistently uncomfortable, almost antagonistic. And then things get truly surreal as mom and dad seem to shift through different phases of their lives in subsequent scenes, going from young to old and back again, as if we are witnessing highlights of their entire partnership on one snowy night. Jake and the woman end up leaving, but let’s just say they have trouble making it home on a night that’s repeatedly called “treacherous.”

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” feels like a movie that could be hurt by the Netflix model. It’s not something that should be watched while being distracted by your phone. It demands attention to allow its mood to find its way under your skin or it really won’t work. It has a remarkable cumulative power, even as it narratively seems to make less and less sense. You have to give yourself over to it, and you'll be moved by some of its later imagery even if you have no idea how to explain why. Kaufman is trying to find a storytelling approach that goes beyond simple plot, conveying the loneliness and relative stasis of human existence. It’s a movie in which the two leads spend most of the film in a moving car and yet it feels like they can’t get anywhere. One says, “you slide into the onslaught of identical days,” which doesn’t just have added meaning in 2020 but seems essential to Kaufman’s approach. Yes, of course, all days are identical, because we are the ones who bring meaning to them, sometimes falsely and sometimes because we have to in order to survive these identical days. The title starts to turn in on itself. You can’t end things. Nothing ends. It just goes on. And even thinking of ending things could actually break the world in front of you.

I’m thinking I probably lost you right around here. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a movie I’m obviously still rolling around in my mind. Roger Ebert notoriously wrote that he had to see “Synecdoche, New York” multiple times to fully appreciate it, and I’m eager to see this one again, away from trying to wrap my brain around how to review it even as it unfolded. It’s a movie that is undeniably complex in terms of symbolism and a more surreal final act than most people will be expecting, but it’s also one that I think works on a foundation of very relatable human emotion. All of Kaufman’s films do in the end. They’re about love, connection, aging, identity—things that haunt us all. Things philosophers and artists have been pondering for generations. Things we all think about. I'm thinking that Kaufman's film may in part even be about the futility of trying to dissect works of art like this one. Let them wash over you. I’m thinking I should stop thinking things. If only.

Now available on Netflix.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Rated R for language including some sexual references.

134 minutes

Jessie Buckley as Young Woman

Jesse Plemons as Jake

Toni Collette as Jake's Mother

David Thewlis as Jake's Father

Colby Minifie as Yvonne

• Charlie Kaufman

Writer (book)

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things Has a Confusing Twist. The Book Can Explain.

How charlie kaufman’s new movie adapts an unadaptable novel..

This article contains major spoilers for both the novel and film versions of I’m Thinking of Ending Things .

I’m Thinking of Ending Things , writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of the 2016 novel by Ian Reid , is remarkably faithful to its source material’s structure and basic plot, which is to say that it is structured around a big, extremely spoilable twist ending. Some movies have mysteries that are better left unsolved, but I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t one of them: There’s a pretty straightforward narrative explanation for why things get so weird, and it’s spelled out more explicitly in the book than in the movie. Here’s a tentative explanation of what’s going on.

The Janitor (Guy Boyd)—and the Twist

Both versions of I’m Thinking of Ending Things , in the broadest possible sense, are about an imaginary couple on an imaginary road trip dreamed up by an elderly high school janitor who is contemplating suicide. Imaginary isn’t quite the right word, though, because Jake, the man on the road trip, is a younger version of the janitor himself, while the woman is loosely based on a real woman the janitor briefly encountered in a bar decades earlier. The narrative is a sort of thought experiment about what it might have been like, from the woman’s perspective, if the janitor had dated her and brought her home to see his parents. In the book, the janitor explicitly spells out what’s happening and why, writing: “We had to try putting her with us. To see what could happen. It was her story to tell.” Although the book and movie have the same high concept, the journey from page to screen required a few structural changes.

The janitor in the book is an outsider artist and custodian in the tradition of Henry Darger, writing the story of the road trip in a series of notebooks that are found after his death, and the main text of the novel is meant to be the contents of those notebooks. Between chapters, Reid inserts brief snippets of a conversation between unidentified speakers about a shocking crime, and it eventually becomes clear they are talking about the janitor’s suicide and the discovery of the notebooks containing the story of the road trip. Kaufman doesn’t have this sort of metatextual trick at his disposal—not a lot of Henry Darger types make feature films for Netflix—so he eliminates the notebooks entirely. Instead, he intercuts between the road trip and brief, unexplained interludes from the janitor’s daily routine until the two stories collide. Sounds and images from the janitor’s day bleed into the road trip story in ways that suggest that the road trip is the janitor’s daydream, but he isn’t writing it down.

In both versions of I’m Thinking of Ending Things , we only get snippets of the janitor’s life story, filtered through his own unreliable narration, so it’s hard to get a clear picture of either man, but they’re not quite the same person. In the novel, the janitor was a gifted student who was doing academic research while working at a biochemistry lab until mental illness derailed his career, and after retreating to his parent’s farmhouse after some sort of breakdown, he works as a high school janitor for 30 years, slowly withdrawing into isolation and his mental illness before killing himself. Kaufman’s janitor doesn’t seem to be quite as smart: The story about winning the school award for “diligence” instead of the one for “acuity” was added to the film, as was the scene in which his mother marvels that he did so well “with no special talent or abilities.” The effect is to make the story less about failure and more about the way some lives are steered toward quiet desperation from the beginning, a theme Jake (Jesse Plemons) expresses in a monologue written for the movie:

It’s despicable how we label people and categorize and dismiss them. I look at the kids I see at school every day, I see the ones who are ostracized—they’re different, they’re out of step—and I see the lives they’ll have because of it. Sometimes I see them years later in town, at the supermarket. I see, I can tell that they still carry that stuff around with them, like a black aura. Like a millstone. Like an oozing wound.

Most of the weirdness in the movie comes from the fact that the janitor is revising his story as he goes, and he isn’t really that good an author. This is probably part of what attracted Kaufman to the book—see Adaptation for more on his writerly insecurity—and most of the things he’s added to the movie explore those themes.

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The Girlfriend (Jessie Buckley)

Both novel and film are ostensibly narrated by Jake’s (imagined, hypothetical) girlfriend, and her voice dominates both stories from the beginning: Kaufman opens his film by having Jessie Buckley read the first chapter nearly verbatim in voice-over. In the movie, however, the girlfriend is slightly more hypothetical, perhaps to reflect the fact that the janitor is daydreaming her story, revising it freely as he goes rather than writing it down in a fixed form. The girlfriend never mentions her name in the novel, but in the movie it keeps changing—Lucy, Louisa, Lucia, Amy—as the janitor games out what it might have been like to have someone else in his life. Similarly, her career is not mentioned in the novel, while in the movie, the janitor adjusts her past to suit his story, changing her into a virologist, a poet, a painter, a quantum physicist, a gerontologist, and a film critic at various points in the film to suit his needs. Her clothes change color from scene to scene, particularly her striped sweater, which seems to be loosely modeled after the Dress . In short, there are many more clues in the film than the book that the girlfriend is not quite a real person.

The Phone Calls

The book also offers more evidence than does the film that the janitor is gaming out this hypothetical road trip to help him decide whether to kill himself. In the movie, the girlfriend gets a series of mysterious phone calls from someone who is leaving her voice messages. In the book, the girlfriend notes that the calls are coming from her own number and keep leaving the same message, word for word. This is also true in the movie, but it’s slightly obscured by the fact that the girlfriend’s name keeps changing. The full text of the initial voicemails is in the novel:

There’s only one question to resolve. I’m scared. I feel a little crazy. I’m not lucid. The assumptions are right. I can feel my fear growing. Now is the time for the answer. Just one question. One question to answer.

Three minutes into the movie, we see the janitor, then Jake, looking out the window of his childhood bedroom and muttering part of that message. We later hear a different part of the message on the girlfriend’s phone. As for what the question is, it’s obvious by the end of the novel, but note that the voicemail has echoes of the opening sentences of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus , in which he writes:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest … comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

In movie and film alike, the road trip is the janitor’s attempt at formulating an answer to that fundamental question.

Jake is the janitor and the janitor is Jake, so see above to find out most of what’s changed about him. One other thing worth noting is that in the film, Jake has a harder time preventing the janitor’s life from bleeding into his story. It isn’t until the 11 th chapter (out of 13) that the novel’s Jake starts telling his girlfriend about the life of a high school janitor in terms that suggest he’s intimately familiar with it. Ten minutes into the film, Jake hears a song from Oklahoma! on the radio—the janitor is sweeping the theater while students rehearse—and somewhat incongruously remarks that he knows the musical well because “they put it on every few years, for obvious reasons,” before mentioning occasionally running into cast members from past productions at the supermarket.

In book and novel alike, Jake has a somewhat contentious relationship with the janitor. Specifically, he objects to the janitor watching him make out with his girlfriend, as any character might if his author kept writing gratuitous sex scenes.

Jake’s Parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette)

Jake’s parents are the same people in the novel and the film, except the film’s janitor has less control over his narrative. In the book, Jake and his girlfriend have an unsettling meal at his parents’ house, but except for one moment when the girlfriend notes that the mother “looks older,” there’s no sense that his parents are unstuck in time. In the film, Thewlis and Collette ping-pong back and forth from young adulthood to extreme old age, and we see tableaus of Jake interacting with his parents at different points in their decline. The simplest explanation is that they are pieced together from old memories (see, e.g., the janitor’s childhood dog, trapped in one moment of trying to shake himself dry). In the novel, we know that the janitor’s parents died a long time ago, but there’s no mention of dementia or Jake caring for them toward the end of their lives, details that add to the sense that the janitor’s life has been invisible. When the girlfriend compliments Jake for taking care of his mother, he remarks: “Sometimes it feels like no one sees the good things you do. Like you’re alone.” The janitor has invented this story and its characters in part so that someone can see the good things he has done.

The Musical Sequences

The novel is set in an unspecified rural location, but the film, shot in New York, is explicitly supposed to be set in Oklahoma. This change was presumably made to provide a natural reason for the janitor to be extremely familiar with the musical Oklahoma! , a text that infuses the whole film. The novel doesn’t mention musical theater at all, but Kaufman takes the observation that anyone working at a high school for 30 years would inevitably see a lot of spring musicals and runs with it. As the janitor’s daydream starts falling apart, it pulls more and more from Oklahoma! , including a lengthy dream ballet sequence . In the musical, the ballet is a laudanum-induced dream in which Laurey Williams works out her feelings about two rival suitors: She imagines marrying Curly McLain only to watch Jud Fry stab him to death. In the janitor’s reimagining of this sequence, Jake marries his girlfriend before he is stabbed to death by the janitor—an image, perhaps, of old age murdering youthful hopes. Similarly, as the film ends, the janitor imagines himself—an older, more successful version of himself—performing “ Lonely Room ,” a song Jud Fry sings in the musical about imagining a better, happier life, where “all of the things that I wish fer turn out like I want them to be.” (If you don’t recall this song from the 1955 movie adaptation, that’s because it omitted it.) Not too surprisingly, Jud Fry doesn’t make it out of Oklahoma! alive.

Tulsey Town

In the book, Jake and his girlfriend make a late-night stop at a Dairy Queen. “Tulsey Town,” the name of the ice-cream store in the movie, was an unofficial name for Tulsa in the 19 th century. The vintage Tulsey Town advertisement the janitor hallucinates toward the end of the film and its jingle draw heavily from this Dairy Queen ad made for drive-in theaters:

The “oozing wound” metaphor Jake makes about unpopular kids becomes very explicit when at Tulsey Town. The janitor staffs the ice-cream stand with students he’s seen during his day: two popular kids and one unpopular one. In her Tulsey Town incarnation, the unpopular kid has a horrible rash on her arms, and Jake has one that matches. (In the novel, it’s the janitor who has the matching rash.)

All of Those References

Charlie Kaufman’s personal interests and insecurities don’t derail his adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things as thoroughly as they did his adaptation of The Orchid Thief , but he’s still worked a lot of them in there, primarily because allusions to other works are one of the main ways he hints that Jake’s girlfriend is fictional. “Most people are other people: Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,” the girlfriend observes in the movie, before pointing out that that too is nothing but a quotation of Oscar Wilde.

Since the janitor doesn’t know anything about the real woman his fantasy girlfriend is based on, Kaufman has him furnish her mind with a shifting hodgepodge of books, movies, and art that he has recently consumed, a tic that is not present in the novel. Over the course of the movie, she will claim authorship of a poem by Eva H.D. , the landscapes of Ralph Albert Blakelock , and Pauline Kael’s review of A Woman Under the Influence . The originals, along with the textbook that allows her to briefly impersonate a virologist, can be found on the shelves of Jake’s childhood bedroom and the walls of his basement, along with the sources for some of Jake’s topics of conversation: a collection of Wordsworth , a paperback copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again , and Anna Kavan’s dystopian novel Ice . There’s also a DVD of A Beautiful Mind , which is where the janitor’s mind goes when he tries to imagine what it might be like to have led a fulfilling life or to have received any recognition for it:

In order to make what’s going on here as explicit as possible, the film also shows us the janitor watching a (fictional) Robert Zemeckis film on one of his meal breaks, and shortly afterward, Jake repurposes a scene from that movie to revise the story of how he met his girlfriend. The novel doesn’t rely on this kind of lift, and when its narrative collapses, neither Oklahoma! nor A Beautiful Mind is in the mix.

The final difference between the book and movie is a pretty simple one: Ian Reid has never put forward the argument that the shittiest twist ending a film could possibly have is “it was all happening inside one man’s mind,” and Charlie Kaufman has:

In Adaptation , Donald Kaufman’s screenplay is the emblem of everything Charlie Kaufman hates about Hollywood, which means adapting I’m Thinking of Ending Things requires at least a little explanation. Kaufman has Jake’s girlfriend address the issue:

Everything wants to live, Jake. … Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live. Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That’s what makes them dangerous.

It took 18 years, but Kaufman has finally found a way to bring The 3 to life.

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things review: An existential thriller unlike any you've seen

Charlie Kaufman's newest movie, coming to Netflix on Sept. 4, will leave you with more questions than answers -- and that's the way it should be. Warning: Minor plot reveals ahead.

Jessie Buckley stars as the young woman in Netflix's I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

Warning: Minor plot reveals ahead.

Charlie Kaufman's strange new psychological thriller I'm Thinking of Ending Things , based on  the book of the same name by Iain Reid, is made for film critics, or at least for people who casually read Pauline Kael , which I'm guessing you don't. I mean, I don't. I don't know that anyone reads Pauline Kael, one of the most influential American film critics ever, casually . Certainly not in 2020.

But Jake, played by Jesse Plemons, seems to. Or at least a collection of Kael's works sits on prominent display in Jake's childhood room, beside the ashes of the dog his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley) was just petting downstairs. Or was the young woman's name Lucia? As characters keep repeating, "It's treacherous out here."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story of Ending Things, which streams Friday on Netflix, is fairly straightforward: Jake is driving to his family's farmhouse with his girlfriend of six weeks (Buckley is credited only as "the young woman"). She meets the parents, played by two ever-excellent actors, Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Jake and his girlfriend leave, amid a blizzard, and wind up at a high school in the middle of the night.

David Thewlis and Toni Collette are unsettling as Jake's parents.

But nothing else is straightforward about this movie. The young woman's identity is constantly in flux -- one moment she's a quantum physicist ("I'm not a metaphorical type gal"), the next she's a poet, a painter, a gerontologist. Jake makes a comment about the John Cassavetes classic A Woman Under the Influence , and his girlfriend is instantly smoking a cigarette, spouting verbatim Kael's review of the movie : "Mabel tries to slit her wrists, and Nick puts a Band-Aid on the cut: the idiot symbolism may make you hoot, but this two-hour-and-thirty-five minute film will leave you too groggy to do more than moan."

What materializes over the course of this film, which also clocks in at over two hours, is a relationship in which Jake is making and remaking his girlfriend according to his own idealized visions. Yet in a movie where Jake is the hinge around which everything and everyone pivots, why are we more attached to the young woman he's dating, at least to start?

This is a movie by the writer of Being John Malkovich , Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . He wrote and directed Synechdoche, New York , which critic Roger Ebert called the best movie of the '00s , and later Anomalisa , a stop-motion animated film.

Kaufman is one of the best screenwriters of the 21st century, and his movies are weird -- like, "John Cusack selling tickets for people to ride around in John Malkovich's head" weird, or "a puppet realizing he's a puppet while looking in the mirror" weird. The line between fiction and reality blurs once again in I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Characters' eyes catch the camera for a little too long to be accidental, people leave one room and enter another a decade older or younger.

The set design and photography are stunning.

The performances are uniformly superb. Jessie Buckley is an exciting up-and-coming Irish actor you may recognize from HBO's Chernobyl , while Jesse Plemons can't seem to pick a bad project lately . The photography, by Łukasz Żal ( Ida , Loving Vincent ), feels starkly different from that of Kaufman's previous films, which often tended toward handheld, sometimes even home-video-styled. This movie is more visually manicured, with beautifully framed stationary shots, and a camera that moves only with great intention.

In line with Kaufman's more recent films, Ending Things feels extremely heady, even writerly. The title and credits appear in Courier font, as though ripped from the script itself. David Foster Wallace, Guy Debord, William Wordsworth, Anna Kavan and even the DSM mental health manual get explicit callouts and often direct quotes, along with Kael. Characters quibble over words and their meanings: wow , sign , sissy , several . And here, in the inescapable self-consciousness of Kaufman, we find Jake once more.

Jake is fully understandable only through the young woman he's dragging around all night. Jake's mother (played fearfully and wonderfully by Collette) tells the young woman about her son's need for control. The obvious reading might focus on Jake's sexism or misogyny -- which we catch glimpses of with his temptation to pin his dysfunctions on his mother, or his willingness to pressure the young woman into uncomfortably vulnerable situations. It'd be a shame if sexism were the focal point, though. In Kael's review of A Woman Under the Influence, she knocks director Cassavetes for attending only to the oppressed woman: "When Nick yells, the picture's only concern is the effect on Mabel," rather than for all the characters, wounded and wounding alike. 

But Kaufman sidesteps this pothole. Since Jake and the young woman are so tightly linked -- "You, me, ideas. We're all one thing," an old-timey animated pig tells a naked janitor late in the film -- their moments of change, of course-correction, are just as character-defining as their transgressions. Jake is tempted to blame his mother for his problems, but the young woman reminds him of the "misogynistic claptrap Freudian bullshit" fueling such an impulse. And Jake responds to Kael's, I mean the young woman's, assessment of A Woman Under the Influence with an inarticulate yet earnest defense of Cassavetes' willingness to empathize with the struggles of society's outcasts.

Stopping for ice cream during a blizzard is one of the less bizarre moments of the movie.

Jake, or the woman, or Kaufman, or the viewer -- we're all the same, the movie tells us, all fallible. We're capable of cruelty and empathy. We're trying to find meaning, trying to live. "Even fake crappy movie ideas want to live," the young woman says early in the film. "Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That's what makes them dangerous."

And so the movie, appropriately, abandons the source novel's tidy finality in favor of ending with a movie idea -- literally a surreal re-creation of a scene from a very different sort of movie that many viewers will instantly recognize.

It's a far more ambiguous approach than the book's, and the story benefits from it. Instead of a physical, obvious "ending things," Kaufman's conclusion feels characteristically complex: both understated and devastating precisely because of its quiet nature. Kaufman's adaptation dwells less on a gimmick or twist and more on the characters' clumsy loves, their loneliness, their performance of irreducible interiority and their urgent, human desire for meaning and beauty.

None of it is real, per se. But, Kaufman seems to say, it's as real as anything.

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‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Review: Where to Begin?

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons play a couple on a trip to some very odd places in Charlie Kaufman’s latest film.

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By A.O. Scott

When I accepted the assignment to review Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” I vowed that I would avoid the recursive, self-conscious, Kaufmanesque flourishes that afflict so much writing about this screenwriter and filmmaker. What follows is the record of my abject failure to live up to that promise.

In my defense: He made me do it. Exercising professional due diligence — in other words, seizing an opportunity to procrastinate on deadline — I acquired a copy of “Antkind,” Kaufman’s recently published novel, only to discover that I’m a minor character in it. A few hundred pages after faintly praising me as “a nice enough fellow and I’m sure a very smart guy for a hack,” the book’s narrator (a quondam critic with nothing nice to say about Charlie Kaufman) challenges me to a barroom argument about cinema. I barely get a word in edgewise, and in the wake of his “vanquishment of A.O. Scott,” my fictional nemesis makes a bold prediction: “Never will he write again. Of that I am certain.”

I would like to think I am right this minute proving him wrong, but I’m not so sure. What is certain is that Kaufman (whom I’ve met a couple of times at film festivals) is living in my head, as I seem to be living in his. And so, whether I like it or not — and to be honest, I don’t really mind — I find myself ensnared in a low-key version of one of his favorite predicaments.

At least since “Being John Malkovich,” in which various schemers, dreamers and paying customers literally inhabit the consciousness of Malkovich, Kaufman has explored the philosophical vertigo and emotional upset caused by the inconvenient fact that other people exist. Again and again, his movies ask: Are we even real to one another, or does each of us project inner desires and anxieties outward, turning the faces and feelings of lovers, colleagues and family members into mirrors of our own narcissism?

Often — notably in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” in “Anomalisa” and now in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” — that question arises in, and threatens to spoil, a heterosexual romance. Men, in particular, have a habit of confusing the objects of their fantasies with the real women in front of them. This can be funny, creepy, sad, toxic or sweet, sometimes all at once.

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In 'I'm Thinking Of Ending Things,' A Couple Gets Stuck In A Dreamlike Limbo

Glen Weldon

Snow Way Out: A couple (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) takes a long road trip during a snowstorm in I'm Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix. Mary Cybulski/Netflix hide caption

Snow Way Out: A couple (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) takes a long road trip during a snowstorm in I'm Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things premieres on Netflix on Friday, September 4.

After finishing writer/director Charlie Kaufman's latest film, which hurls so many things at you as you watch it you find yourself bobbing and weaving just to keep up, I longed to talk it over with other people. It's that kind of movie, wrapped in a thick shroud of fully intentional ambiguity that always threatens to thin to mere vagueness, and it benefits from the kind of unpacking that grows out of discussion. But as the film wasn't out yet, I tentatively clicked on a few advance reviews.

There, to my surprise and no small amount of dismay, I found ... just a whole metric ton of spoilers.

To be fair: This is the kind of movie it is almost impossible to write or talk about without revealing What's Really Going On, unless one sticks to the barest bones of the plot.

So let's do that. A young couple who've only recently gotten together (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) take a long car trip during a snowstorm to have dinner with the guy's parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their farmhouse. They have dinner. Things get awkward; weird stuff happens. The couple drives back to the city. The snow gets worse. Things grow more awkward. Weirder stuff happens.

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'anomalisa' is a charlie kaufman movie featuring puppets. yes, it's weird.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't begin to convey what sets I'm Thinking of Ending Things apart, or what makes it so recognizably and indelibly a film only Kaufman can or would make. I will endeavor to do so here, without spoiling What's Really Going On, by striving to keep things ambiguous, though we might have to settle for vague.

This is not, to be clear, a movie that harbors a Big Twist that must be protected at all costs. It's not a puzzle that, once solved, surrenders everything that made it interesting in the first place. For one thing, you know that things are hinky from the jump — Buckley's interior monologue seems strangely stilted, and keeps getting interrupted by Plemons' halting, unwieldy conversational gambits. These two people aren't on the same wavelength, though one of them clearly wants them, aches for them, to be. So things between them, and around them, subtly shift, and keep shifting.

On the surface, the critique Kaufman seems to want the film to make — the one he keeps shoving into the mouths of this couple over and over again, particularly in the two long car drives that make up the film's first and third acts — goes something like this: We humans subsist on false, manufactured, derivative narratives and inauthentic emotions to distract us from what is True and Original and Real.

But let's be real, or, you know, Real: That whole notion, especially as it's presented here, is a facile, boring one — the kind of pseudo-intellectual, solipsistic nugget of received, pre-digested "wisdom" you might remember getting spouted by the most tendentious, arrogant mansplainer in your college dorm, that one time at a party when he put down his acoustic guitar long enough to corner you over by the Funyons and demand you read Bukowski.

And that , it seems to me at least, is What's Really Going On, here.

Kaufman's true target isn't anything so abstract and anodyne as "modern life," or the way it encourages us to fall into intellectual laziness and disingenuously parrot thoughts, take up positions and form identities we've cribbed from things we've read or watched or heard. No, he's directing his mocking derision at the people (let's face it: the men, overwhelmingly) who lie to themselves about their own gifts, who too-eagerly embrace the need to be seen as the smartest, the cleverest, the most special, and who resolutely fail to connect with others because of it.

This being a Charlie Kaufman joint, we are reasonably safe in assuming that he's calling out himself, and others like him.

Over the course of the film, we see memories of past slights — and a lifetime of outright humiliations — mix with a desperate longing to be, and to have always been, accepted, embraced, validated. To have one's every pat, received notion about life, and visual art, and film, and the essays of David Foster Wallace (come on, that's a tell) vigorously agreed with, and eagerly shared, by someone, anyone, else: Eternal Sunshine of the Incel Mind .

That's a lot of conceptual work to lay upon the shoulders of your actors, especially when you keep buffeting them with continuous, mysterious shifts in mood, motivation, characterization, backstory and, not for nothing, wardrobe that would seem to deny them the bedrock emotional grounding that the craft of acting requires.

But Buckley is terrific, modulating her performance to accommodate whatever way Kaufman's wind is blowing, from scene to scene. Plemons is low-key terrifying in the way he eases from surly and resentful to pleading and pitiable to stoic and unreadable. Thewlis is by turns creepy and heartbreaking, and Collette's is a performance you find yourself watching with open-mouthed incredulity and awe. Say this much: She adds yet another wildly uncomfortable family dinner scene to an IMDB profile already studded with them.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things may be downbeat — and hoo boy, is it — yet it avoids the dour misanthropy of much of Kaufman's work. Only just, though. Your mileage may vary of course, but I found a moment, late in the film, when a character seems to forgive themselves for living an empty, emotionally stunted life quietly breathtaking, because knowing his stuff, I never expected Kaufman to permit himself or his characters (who are we kidding: himself) even the possibility of grace.

It's not a sentiment I was prepared to extend to the character in question, nor do I think Kaufman expects the audience to. But it was nice to see Kaufman letting up on himself — or at least, the self he sees in the mirror — for even a second, given that he's spent so much of his career flagellating himself for our amusement.

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things First Reviews: Challenging, Steeped in Dread, and Unapologetically Weird

Critics say charlie kaufman's latest is another unique vision anchored by fantastic performances that will be rewarding for fans but might frustrate unprepared viewers..

Based on the psychological horror novel by Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the latest head trip from Charlie Kaufman ( Synecdoche, New York ), this one a Netflix Original. The first reviews of the movie are predominantly positive, but there’s a consensus that it’s not for everyone given that the filmmaker’s usual non-literal and existentialist storytelling leads to some very weird places. But even if you’re not the biggest fan of Kaufman, you might find enjoyment in the performances by leads Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons as a couple heading to meet his parents — as well as Toni Collette and David Thewlis as those parents — in the closest we get to a straightforward plot.

Here’s what critics are saying about I’m Thinking of Ending Things :

Will Charlie Kaufman fans like it ?

It’s Kaufman’s best film yet as a director. –  James Clay, Fresh Fiction

[It’s] his most tender film: his intricate flourishes are in service of something far gentler and open-hearted than any of his previous work. –  Luke Gorham, In Review Online

I’m Thinking of Ending Things  is by far his bleakest, so steeped in suffocating anxiety it should come with a mental health advisory. –  David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s possibly Kaufman’s most challenging work yet. Whether that challenge will reward you depends on your taste and tolerance. –  John Nugent, Empire Magazine

I’m Thinking of Ending Things feels like both an act of self-parody for its director and  also  a radical departure from his previous work…it takes Kaufman’s usual fixations and turns them inside out. –  David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Which of his films is it most reminiscent of ?

I’m Thinking of Ending Things  is even stranger than Kaufman’s 2008 directing debut  Synecdoche, New York . – Matt Goldberg, Collider

A perfect companion piece for the physical deterioration on display in  Synecdoche … [but] I’m Thinking of Ending Things  is completely focused on the interior and becomes all the more terrifying and heartbreaking in its various turns. – Kyle Pinion, ScreenRex

Hardcore Kaufman heads will get the most out of  I’m Thinking of Ending Things  — although I’d rate myself as a significant admirer of his work, and this left me colder than anything he’s done since  Human Nature . – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

(Photo by Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020)

What else is it like?

Feels like a spiritual mate of sorts to Amy Seimetz’s recently released She Dies Tomorrow in its means towards pondering mortality. – Tomris Laffly, The Playlist

I’m Thinking of Ending Things suggests a joyless couple out of a mediocre Woody Allen film crossed with Barton Fink. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Linklater-esque dialogue laced with Bergman-esque dread. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

[It’s] as if Alejandro Jodorowsky directed  Meet The Parents . – John Nugent, Empire Magazine

Tonally and structurally, it reminds me a lot of  mother! , Darren Aronofsky’s similarly phantasmagorical tale of an unhappy couple trapped in a country house. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

Will fans of the book appreciate the adaptation?

Kaufman has probably made as complex and audaciously loopy a film as admirers of Reid’s novel could have desired. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

In adapting this generic puzzlebox setup, Kaufman demonstrates an elegance of vision elsewhere absent from his work. – Luke Gorham, In Review Online

Kaufman produces a finale so close in spirit to the novel that it feels pulled from the same pages. Or at least ripped from an alternate-universe version of Reid’s book. – Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

Viewers will probably benefit from familiarizing themselves with the source material. – Hannah Woodhead, Little White Lies

If you’re trying to follow it without having read the book, it may not make a lick of sense – and even if you have, Kaufman goes in directions that Reid never did. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

Does the movie work as a horror film ?

It’s really scary in a way that conventional scary movies really aren’t scary: insidiously disquieting and yet also somehow poignant and sad. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

[It’s] a waking nightmare — its horrors are the more mundane, existential fears of aging out of love, of relevance, of your own mind. – Clint Worthington, Consequence of Sound

Nothing but the existential terror of our own existence…  Thinking of Ending Things  is awash in a sea of anxieties to drown its audience in fear and sorrow. – Matt Goldberg, Collider

Charlie Kaufman, true to unique, auteur form, has crafted a story that invokes so much more than what conventional genre classification easily describes. – Leigh Monson, What to Watch

So it’s pretty heady ?

It turns out that Christopher Nolan is not the only director making long, stylish brain-teasers these days. – Steve Pond, The Wrap

I’m Thinking of Ending Things feels less like a film about thought than it does a thought that’s been filmed. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

By the time the film’s final minutes arrive, you’ll be scratching your head and beaming with solemn understanding at the same time. – Clint Worthington, Consequence of Sound

Is it maybe too weird for some viewers ?

The problem with I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t that it’s too weird, but that it’s the work of a filmmaker who keeps asking “Is love possible?” even when he’s stacked the deck against it. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

The further  I’m Thinking of Ending Things  gets from any semblance of a recognizable reality, the less there is to care about any of the characters and what will happen to them if they ever arrive at their destination — if they even have one. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

How are Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley ?

This is Buckley’s show, and she further cements her status as one of the gutsiest and most intuitive actors in the world. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Buckley continues her streak of grounding heavy-duty narratives with emotionally shattering interiority. – Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

Plemons establishes himself with this role as the heir apparent to Philip Seymour Hoffman… the tragic grandeur of his performance and the aching burden of Jake’s secrets creep up on you. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

[He’s] a first-rate actor, here suggesting the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tightly coiled melancholy. – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

[He] evokes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s torment without his passion. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

And what about Toni Collette and David Thewlis as the parents ?

Collette and Thewlis are easily the show-stealers, swinging moods with such vicious intensity that it’s astounding that their characters feel at all cohesive. – Leigh Monson, What to Watch

David Thewlis’ buttery British accent is coupled with venomous words that rivals his performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked . – James Clay, Fresh Fiction

Thewlis delivers the best line-reading of the year while describing the temperature during his brief appearance. – Hannah Woodhead, Little White Lies

Collette either escapes [Kaufman’s] grasp or was unfortunately encouraged by her director to run through a gamut of tics that not-so-fondly recall her terrorized possession in  Hereditary . – Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

Who else deserves recognition ?

Jay Wadley’s flurried, virtuosic score is as much of a scene-stealer as Molly Hughes’ lived-in and creaky production design. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

It’s in the editing by Robert Frazen and the cinematography by Lukasz Zal that gives the film kinetic energy to place you right in the middle of the action, it’s almost alienating. – James Clay, Fresh Fiction

So is it good or bad ?

It exists outside the good/bad spectrum because it is a very successful at being excruciating. It is a horror film without reprieve and without answer. – Matt Goldberg, Collider

On many levels it’s a bold, brilliant work… yet in many fundamental ways, the movie is frustrating; it’s frequently a hard slog, as distancing as it is illuminating. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

With Kaufman, always, I’m willing to take the vexations along with the rewards. – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

[It’s] a work unlike anything else you’re bound to see this year. It’s haunting and hilarious. Disturbing and captivating. It hypnotizes you like a cobra than goes in for a kiss instead of a bite. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Will we need to see it more than once ?

I suspect that many viewers will want to rewatch the film fairly quickly, to piece together the pieces of meta narrative sprinkled throughout and to make full sense of an ending that might be a bit less definitive than expected. – Leigh Monson, What to Watch

I felt like I would absolutely appreciate the film more if I watched it a second time, and could not fathom having the patience to sit through it again any time soon. – Matt Singer, ScreenCrush

I’m Thinking of Ending Things  premieres on Netflix on September 4.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) 82%

Thumbnail image by Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX © 2020

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‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Review: Charlie Kaufman Directs a Bad Romance in the Twilight Zone

Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley star in a surreal love drama that finds the wizard of 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' curdling into knee-jerk hopelessness.

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“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the new movie written and directed by Charlie Kaufman , opens with an extended road-trip sequence in which a young woman ( Jessie Buckley ) — she’s identified in the credits simply as the Young Woman — drives through a country snowstorm with Jake ( Jesse Plemons ), her boyfriend of six weeks, to meet his parents at their Oklahoma farmhouse. The first words we hear, in voiceover, are Buckley confessing “I’m thinking of ending things,” and she then describes what could be a suicidal tendency. But the words also apply to the relationship she’s in. Should she be ending that ?

During the car ride, we see why that question might be hanging in the balance. Buckley’s young woman is no happy camper, but with her fast-break grin, her blithe putdowns, and her aureole of reddish curls, she has a cynical urban vivacity. But Jake, who sounds like he’s never cracked a joke in his life, is a painfully staid and passive fellow with a dry, droning voice and a way of showing off his arcane knowledge of things that can bring any conversation to a standstill. At his behest, the two discuss Wordsworth, Mussolini, the musical “Oklahoma!” and suicide bombers, but mostly they seem to be acting out their mutual sense of muffled despair. When Buckley tells us that she can’t imagine the relationship lasting, we nod our heads, thinking: It’s hard to see, actually, how it ever lasted past one or two blah dates.

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Listening to these two, we can see what the problem is: They’re depressives who don’t spark each other. What they have isn’t a relationship — it’s a slow-motion death dance. And a movie about them is destined to be a kind of death dance, too. But then comes one of those lines of dialogue that reveals, almost inadvertently, where a filmmaker is coming from. Buckley’s character, having acknowledged her attraction to ending things, tells Jake that she actually thinks everything on earth wants to live. “Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live,” she says. “Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That’s what makes them dangerous.”

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That line is a tell, because no ordinary person would say it. They might talk about movies, but not about “movie ideas,” and certainly not about crappy movie ideas replacing real ideas; that’s the way a screenwriter thinks. And what Charlie Kaufman reveals in that line is that he sees himself engaged in a war against fake, crappy movie ideas, a war that he’s fighting with real ideas. Okay, fine; that’s what any adventurous filmmaker does. But in the place where Kaufman is now working from, he has so dichotomized that conflict — between the fake and the real, between bogus Hollywood uplift and the terrible “truth” of what life is — that he’s presenting the audience with a film that’s an homage to hopelessness. There isn’t a spark of faith or good feeling in sight. That’s because Kaufman is now treating hopelessness as the ultimate signifier of integrity.

Going into a new Charlie Kaufman film, our own hopes as moviegoers are always raised, because at his best he’s a wizard of the imagination, and a uniquely grounded anti-romantic romantic. But “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” suggests a joyless couple out of a mediocre Woody Allen film crossed with “Barton Fink.” It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose. Kaufman seems to be saying that love is an illusion and that people, if they’re true to who they are, have no possibility of connecting. But he seems trapped in the blinkered point-of-view of a socially arrested high-school loser. We want honesty from a Charlie Kaufman movie, but “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 psychological horror novel, is a bad-news “Twilight Zone” episode that isn’t telling difficult truths; it’s just a Debbie Downer dud. His films had more complex excitement, and more of a light-and-dark tingle, 15 years ago. He’s not growing — he’s curdling.

Starting in 1999, with “Being John Malkovich,” what a run he had! For about five years, Charlie Kaufman could do no wrong, and that’s because his movies, even when they weren’t perfect, had an unruly metastasizing life that seemed to fuse with the synapses in your own brain. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) was his magnum opus, and it was a thing of beauty — though one heard stories about how the film’s director, Michel Gondry, treated Kaufman’s script as an overgrown forest that had to be pruned into something shapelier.

That was 16 years ago. Kaufman took four more years to produce his next film (his first as a director), the postmodern head-scratcher “Synecdoche, New York,” which expressed the side of Charlie Kaufman that saw life as a crossword puzzle that could never be solved. For some of us, it was borderline unwatchable; for a small cult, it’s some kind of masterpiece. (These are the people who read all of “Finnegan’s Wake” in college.) But what strikes me is that having gotten that movie out of his system, Kaufman has done very little since. Is it because he’s become a specialist in writing screenplays that revel in their downbeat misanthropic density?

When Jake and the young woman arrive at his family farm, he shows her around, even though they’re in the middle of a freezing storm. In the sheep pen, a couple of lambs have died and are frozen solid, which inspires Jake to tell a lovely story about pigs who got eaten alive by maggots. I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor. (Life is like a pig eaten by maggots — you never know what you’re gonna get!) Then they go inside and meet Jake’s parents: his father, played by David Thewlis in an old man’s thin gray hair (with a mysterious Band-Aid on his temple), and Toni Collette, as his rambunctiously overeager mother. Moments later, when they’re seated at the dinner table, Thewlis, with thick brown hair, looks 30 years younger. So this is going to be a movie in which surreal things start happening.

The mother and father keep morphing in age, though that doesn’t make their personalities any less broad or more convincing. And the young woman’s profession keeps changing. First she’s studying quantum physics, then gerontology, then she’s a painter, then she’s a waitress. There’s a dog who never stops shaking himself off, and an ominous basement (as in “Don’t go in the…”). It seems naggingly odd that Thewlis is playing an “Eh, wot?” British farmer in the middle of Oklahoma (he acts like he’s at a pub), and Collette’s character is the kind of prattling narcissist who tears down her son when she thinks she’s building him up. No wonder Jake is such a lump. Except he’s also a jerk, the kind of boyfriend who treats his partner as an appendage, and Jesse Plemons, an actor I’ve always liked, seems to empty himself out to play a character who evokes Philip Seymour Hoffman’s torment without his passion.

The film’s quicksand reality keeps us watching, for a while. Yet “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” lacks the adventurous humanity that animated Kaufman’s “Anomalisa.” Once Jake and the young woman finish their visit, driving back through a blizzard, there’s still an hour of movie to go, and at that point it’s running on David Lynchian fumes. The two stop for ice cream at the Tulsey Town stand, and they get into a debate about John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” in which the young woman’s dialogue consists entirely of verbatim quotes from Pauline Kael’s review of it. Kaufman seems to have filled this movie with his obsessions, and Netflix (unlike Michel Gondry) doesn’t ask you to prune them. They’ll finance gifted filmmakers by the yard. That said, the problem with “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” isn’t that it’s too weird, but that it’s the work of a filmmaker who keeps asking “Is love possible?” even when he’s stacked the deck against it.

Reviewed online, New York, Aug. 25, 2020. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 134 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Likely Story, Projective Testing Service production. Producers: Anthony Bregman, Charlie Kaufman, Robert Salerno, Stefanie Azpiazu.  Executive producers: Gregory Zuk, Peter Cron.
• Crew: Director, writer: Charlie Kaufman. Camera: Lukasz Zal. Editor: Robert Frazen. Music: Jay Wadley.
• With: Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Guy Boyd, Abby Quinn, Hadley Robinson.

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I'm Thinking of Ending Things Reviews

One time-wasting exercise in awkwardness, exasperation and pretentiousness.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 30, 2024

If I were to say that I’m Thinking of Ending Things messes with your mind, that wouldn’t even begin to tell you what you’re in store for. It’s unconventional, but so is director Charlie Kaufman.

Full Review | Apr 23, 2024

Kaufman’s look at love, loss, legacy, and musicals is just downright bonkers.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2024

From the incredibly perplexing narrative told through bizarre storytelling to its distinctly unconventional technical characteristics, Charlie Kaufman offers a remarkably complex film that can take various interpretations (requires more than one viewing).

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2023

Kaufman often crafts Möbius strip narratives that turn in on themselves, and his characters are typically unhappy, insecure, and stuck in their own heads. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is no exception.

Full Review | Jul 22, 2023

A masterclass in modern surrealist filmmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 2, 2022

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is sometimes too esoteric for its own good, but it remains entirely engrossing the whole way through, particularly thanks to Jessie Buckley's brilliant lead performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

I loved Kaufman‘s faith in his audience to find the many pieces and fit them together themselves. But it wasn’t until the second viewing that things really clicked.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

At once an expression of interiority drawing from ideas swirling around in Kaufman's brain and a self-loathing critique of that inwardness, I'm Thinking of Ending Things questions the extent to which we see each other as real.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 18, 2022

Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a lot of things: a heartbreaking story of aging, a metaphysical thriller, an emotional portrayal of a dread-filled existence, and a time-bending experience.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 11, 2022

The mindbending auteur's latest film feels like a culmination of all that came before it.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2021

A tiresome regurgitation of some merit.

Full Review | Original Score: 53/100 | Aug 19, 2021

Really about writing fiction more than [it's] about the characters themselves or anything else.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 6, 2021

Kaufman's skewed slant on reality may frame the movie, but it's Buckley's terrific talent that makes it worth watching.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2021

If you, like me, are a sucker for Kaufman's labyrinthine film-school surrealism and deep analyses of white male self-pity, then you'll find 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' is one of the best films of the year.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2021

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is one of the best films of 2020.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 17, 2021

Twenty minutes in, I was thinking of ending my watching of this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Feb 10, 2021

I would not advise trying to make sense of anything in I'm Thinking of Ending Things. It's best to just roll with whatever Kaufman throws at you and enjoy the quartet of actors who give everything they've got to this strange, strange film.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2021

In the film's final twenty, trippy minutes Kaufman artfully brings the movie's themes of regret and longing into focus with a bizarre and beautiful climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 29, 2021

The first time I watched ... I'm Thinking of Ending Things, I lost myself for a little while.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2021

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things review: One of Charlie Kaufman’s best and bleakest films

Kaufman has taken ian reid’s debut novel, published in 2016, and done away with its traditional mystery trappings – replacing them with a single, despairing mood , article bookmarked.

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Dir: Charlie Kaufman. Starring: Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Guy Boyd. 15 cert, 134 mins

Life plays out like a stale and unfulfilling romance, according to Charlie Kaufman ’s latest, I’m Thinking of Ending Things . We say yes and yes and yes again, to education, relationships, jobs, marriages, and homes. At some point, in some small moment of stillness, the question arises: “How did I get here?”

The young woman ( Jessie Buckley ) in I’m Thinking of Ending Things has started to ask herself this. Kaufman, once enough of an idealist to give his lovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a second shot, has curdled in the intervening years. This, arguably, is the writer-director’s bleakest film – surpassing even the drooping plasticine expressions and tragic narcissism of his stop-motion puppets in Anomalisa . It’s also one of his best.

“I’m thinking of ending things,” the woman says to herself. She chews over the words, repeating them over and over again in the hope that they’ll suddenly gain the significance she was searching for. She’s not quite sure what she wants to end. Is it her life? Her relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons)? They’ve only dated for seven weeks, though the time has felt strangely infinite. This marks their first substantial trip together – a visit to his parents, out on their farm. But none of it really seems to matter anymore, now that this thought of ending, well, something has taken hold of her mind. “It’s there whether I like it or not,” she remarks. Buckley’s narration comes out as a casual half-whisper, as if these thoughts had been hastily scribbled in a diary.

Kaufman has taken Ian Reid’s debut novel, published in 2016, and done away with its traditional mystery trappings. Gone is its bait-and-switch ending, replaced with a single mood – one that’s not so much about suicidal ideation or break-ups as the black hole of emotions they have a tendency to create. The young woman arrives at a farmhouse where nothing is right. The lambs are all dead, the pigs long gone after their bellies became infested with maggots. Jimmy, the dog, is wet and perpetually shaking.

Jake’s mother (Toni Colette, as terrifying here as she is in Hereditary ) is the perpetual hysteric, cackling so violently that her jaw threatens to retreat inside her own neck. His father (David Thewlis, also on unnerving form) spews nonsense out in tar-coloured croaks – “The food will be cold as a witch’s tit in a brass brassiere,” he declares ahead of dinner. The pair of them are like hyenas – snivelling, snarling, fierce, and pathetic all at once.

Editor Robert Frazen works like a trickster god, cutting between jarringly different angles in such quick succession that even the simplest of conversations soon descends into delirium. Details change without warning: clothes, jobs, and hobbies. Jake’s parents age rapidly between scenes, as if we’re watching corpses decompose before our eyes. We switch occasionally to the viewpoint of an elderly janitor at a high school, entranced by rehearsals for a production of Oklahoma! .

The film is disconnecting from itself. So is the woman who inhabits it. She’s Lucy, Louisa, Lucia – her identity forever in flux. At one point, she becomes temporarily possessed by the spirit of film critic Pauline Kael, reeling off her review of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence , as Buckley’s voice slows and deepens into melodious tones. At another, she’s Eva HD reciting her poem “Bonedog” and its lines: “You return home, moon-landed, foreign”.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,” Buckley’s character tells Jake. It’s a quote from Oscar Wilde. Kaufman seems fond of it. What, then, defines us as individuals? Is it love? The young woman eventually forgets her boyfriend’s face. He becomes just one in a thousand “non-interactions in my life”. Kaufman all but admits that there may be no answer to that question. Suddenly, I’m Thinking of Ending Things starts to feel like the most frightening film of the year.

But, if there is hope to be found, it’s in Buckley’s lopsided smile – the trademark of an actor who’s shown herself capable of unearthing fathomless empathy. That smile, simple as it is, is so warm, so open, that it could only belong to a woman who believes, somewhere inside of her, that life is worth fighting for. She is the small flicker of light in the dark.

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I’m Thinking Of Ending Things Review

04 Sep 2020

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things

The last time Charlie Kaufman attempted to adapt a book, the 2002 meta-mindfuck Adaptation , he was hit with such a brutal writer’s block that he placed himself into the movie as the character, and invented himself a twin brother, too. (Donald Kaufman remains the only fictional person to be nominated for an Oscar.) There’s no sign of him as a character in this, his eighth film as writer and third as director, so we can presume the writing process went a bit better. But Charlie Kaufman is all over it.

Adapted from the 2016 book by Iain Reid (a good fit), Kaufman’s hallmarks are everywhere: an anxious, despairing outlook on relationships, self-worth, and humanity; a withering critique of Western culture; a fourth wall that doesn’t so much break as implode; and an insatiable appetite for the surreal.

Like his 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind , it begins near the end of a relationship: Lucy (a beautifully understated Buckley ) considers in voiceover her “unfixable” relationship with Jake ( Plemons , channelling former Kaufman collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman), on their way to the first meeting with Jake’s mother and father. But, as Lucy (or is it Louisa?) soon observes, something is “profoundly wrong”.

As incisive a director as he is a writer, Kaufman makes hay of his limited budget with economical, artful filmmaking, using smart visual devices to foster an accelerating sense of confusion and reality-bending. Lucy’s internal narration is sometimes interrupted by external dialogue; camera angles are jaunty and disorientating; the action occasionally and inexplicably cuts to shots of a janitor mopping a school corridor, for reasons that only become clear (or not) later in the film.

Kaufman seems uninterested in neat narrative closed loops, and the third act offers none of the jaw-dropping big reveals of the book.

When they finally arrive at Jake’s family farm, the film starts to play like a surrealist farce — as if Alejandro Jodorowsky directed Meet The Parents . Mum ( Collette , making her Hereditary matriarch look homely by comparison) is frantic, always pulling at her ears, and deranged. Dad ( Thewlis ) is a literalist farmer with a pronounced Lancashire accent who thinks “Billy Crystal is a nancy”. Both laugh a little too long for comfort at terrible jokes. Neither seem to age in a linear way.

“There is no objective reality,” Jake notes at one point, which feels like a manifesto for the film, as eventually everything that might be considered ‘plot’ crumbles. Kaufman seems uninterested in neat narrative closed loops, and the third act offers none of the jaw-dropping big reveals of the book, ending on somewhere between a startled bang and a confused whimper.

What to make of a film that quotes Tolstoy, Emerson and Wordsworth, and ends with an interpretive dance, an animated ghost pig, and a naked old man crying in a truck? How do you review a film which itself, perplexingly, contains a film review (a scathing ’70s diatribe from Pauline Kael)? I’m Thinking Of Ending Things feels as much a bitter take on disappointing men and their worthless lives as it is a despairing indictment of Hollywood, Kaufman included — but then trying to fully understand it, in traditional narrative terms, is surely just a wasted effort. It’s possibly Kaufman’s most challenging work yet. Whether that challenge will reward you depends on your taste and tolerance.

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Charlie Kaufman out-Kaufmans himself in the loopy, surreal I'm Thinking of Ending Things : Review

A Charlie Kaufman project often feels less like a movie than an unsolved mystery, a kind of meta puzzlebox whose whirring gears and trapdoors only drop to reveal... more curiosities. In films he strictly penned the script for, like Adaptation and Being John Malkovich , those wilder instincts are often tempered; in the ones he also directs ( Synecdoche, New York ; Anomalisa ), his id runs free.

And oh, does it sprint through I’m Thinking of Ending Things , a riddle wrapped in an enigma and staged like a passion play. Jessie Buckley is Lucy (or is she?), a young woman meeting her boyfriend Jake’s ( Jesse Plemons ) family for the first time. But as they bicker and parry through a driving snowstorm, she seems to be having more than second thoughts — doubts not reassured by the uncanny American Gothic tableau that greets them when they arrive: hysterically high-strung mother ( Toni Collette ); odd, insinuating father ( David Thewlis ).

Even the property itself looks depressed, the neglected relic of another era. And anomalies keep creeping into the frame: a scorched patch of earth in the barn, ragged scratches on a basement door, animals and objects that seem to move to their own time signatures. Lucy’s own backstory shifts constantly too; whether she’s a landscape painter, a grad student, a gerontologist. But allusions to her “real” life increasingly feel like feints, a series of shifting fictions in this place where age and identity are as malleable as the weather.

There are intimations in all this of some kind of horror; a house of secrets and strange, scurrying things. The source material, Canadian writer Iain Reid's 2016 novel of the same name , has more explicit words for that, but Kaufman’s characters mostly just talk, and their dizzying stretches of dialogue — about insects or cinema or soft-serve ice cream — have the quality of both earnest debate and avant-garde theater, ebbing and flowing on their own inscrutable tides.

Buckley and Plemons are left to carry that water for much of I'm Thinking 's 134-minute runtime, and they're both fantastically game, infusing the movie's heady concepts with a naturalism that borders on heroic. Their job, they seem to know, is not to be actors so much as ambassadors to this planet: prisms refracting all the strange marvels contained in Kaufman’s great, jittery brain. In moments that portal is genuinely thrilling, but it can be exhausting, too; like being set down and left to wander, without a compass or a map, in the center of someone else’s dream. B

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‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’

Charlie Kaufman, master of psychological horror?

The title I’m Thinking of Ending Things suggests a joke about director/writer Charlie Kaufman’s reliably baffling third acts. But this Netflix release is an adaptation of Iain Reid’s acclaimed 2016 novel of the same name, and it’s a psychological chiller perfectly suited to our frayed pandemic brains. In it, a guy named Jake (Jesse Plemons) is taking his newish girlfriend ( Jessie Buckley ) home to meet the parents for the first time. In different hands, this could be a setup for Ben Stiller-esque slapstick. Here it’s a harrowing mind-bender about desire and death and time and the nature of reality and “Oklahoma!”

I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS ★★★★ (4/5 stars) Directed by: Charlie Kaufman Written by: Charlie Kaufman Starring: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis Running time: 134 min

Buckley’s Lucy is our narrator, and she is indeed thinking of ending things, from the moment she gets in the car with Jake. Their stiff banter doesn’t really jibe with the notion that they’ve been a couple for any amount of time. Something feels off. Little details come unmoored, waver slightly. You find yourself questioning what you saw, or remember, about a character. What you heard, or thought you heard, in the background. This is the opposite of a comfort-watch.

Their arrival at his parents’ farmhouse takes the unease up several notches. Toni Collette and David Thewlis are a brilliantly twitchy parody of parental awkwardness. If you’ve seen Hereditary, it is very hard not to bring your Collette associations into this. She’s just such a master of creep. Lucy drifts around the house, meeting a surreal border collie who won’t stop shaking off water, and finding a picture of herself as a child on the wall. Only it’s Jake. Or is it? Time, as so many of us are fond of saying lately, means nothing, as the parents morph through different ages and life stages. How long have they all been here?

In cutaways, a janitor at a high school is watching kids rehearsing the roles of Curly and Laurey in Oklahoma! (the old-fashioned one) and, on TV, a Hollywood meet-cute story of lovers at a diner. Credits suddenly blare “Directed by Robert Zemeckis,” at which you can just imagine the staunchly anti-commercial Kaufman making a jerkoff motion.

If the car ride to the farmhouse was interminable, the ride back is doubly so. This sequence is really the test for whether you’re on board with whatever it is Kaufman’s up to. The conversation between Jake and Lucy (or is it Louisa?) flows through endless philosophical themes. Buckley’s character is a physicist, but she’s also a poet. And a painter. And, at one point, Pauline Kael, as Buckley waves a cigarette around and quotes at length from the critic’s A Woman Under the Influence review.

I’ve never been hugely impressed with Kaufman’s portrayals of women– his 2015 Anomalisa seemed particularly sour towards Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character–but his work with Buckley here is terrific, exploring the reasons one stays in a relationship that’s less than fulfilling. Plemons is also great, fusing a salt-of-the-earth affect with an undercurrent of something darker.

I’ve always believed old cartoons are deeply nightmarish, and Kaufman backs me up with Jake’s reverie of a black-and-white commercial for an ice cream shack called Tulsey Town, where the couple stops for dessert in the middle of a blizzard. The question is, whose nightmare is it? And where is it headed? As Buckley’s character tries to piece together what’s happening, you may find yourself ahead of her (especially if you’ve read the book), but Kaufman handily offers both a solid conclusion and a variety of ways to interpret it. The whole thing unsettled me profoundly, and echoed the sense of temporal chaos around us. Still, nice to escape into a world, even if it’s a horror-scape, where intellectual riffing is actually a virtue.

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Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart is a film critic and a culture and entertainment writer whose work is featured in the New York Post, CNN.com, and more. A Rotten Tomatoes certified reviewer for both film and television, Sara's work can be fully appreciated at sarastewart.org. But not on Twitter, because she’s been troll-free since 2018.

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Netflix's 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' is another dizzying triumph by Charlie Kaufman

All film criticism is personal. Every review requires revealing something of a critic’s own experiences, their knowledge, their tastes, their values, their interests and obsessions.

But writing about a Charlie Kaufman movie feels, at least for this critic, even more personal than most. It feels deeper and more specific, like really digging into this movie might reveal more than I'd like to you about how I see and understand the world.

Like his 2008 masterpiece Synecdoche, New York , I’m Thinking of Ending Things is dense with surreal details and cryptic meaning. It takes a dead-simple premise — a woman (Jessie Buckley) goes with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to his childhood home so she can meet his parents for the first time — and sprawls out in all directions. It burrows under the surface, wriggles into hidden corners, tiptoes into the basement, winds up the walls, and stares right at you through the screen.

It’s doing so much, and about so much, all at once, that deciding where to start talking about it becomes its own sort of Rorschach test. Is it a film about identity? Aging? Gender? Relationships? Creativity? It’s about all of those themes and more, and each of these is worth exploring in due time, but which one pings your radar first and hardest probably tells you something about what you’re most sensitive to.

Or maybe it doesn’t. One of the things I’m Thinking of Ending Things is about is the way we consume art, absorb it into our minds and personalities until we can’t tell where we end and someone else’s ideas begin, and then reflect it back out onto the world as a portrait of ourselves.

The film itself is made up of bits and pieces of other works of art that the characters have claimed as their own, understood to be their own opinions and desires and creations. The woman recites a poem she wrote; we later learn it’s actually a poem by Eva H.D., from her book Rotten Perfect Mouth . As we understand the situation in the movie, this isn’t the protagonist committing an act of plagiarism. It’s that thing where you come up with what you think is a brilliant original concept, and later realize you were just repeating something you heard someone else say.

So I’m maybe — definitely — probably almost certainly — overstating the case about how much what you think of I’m Thinking of Ending Things says about who you are as a person. This film would caution that while it’s natural to over-identify with a piece of culture that speaks to you, that doesn’t mean it’s ideal. You need to be something other than the things you like.

Besides, lots of people won’t find anything at all to react to in I’m Thinking of Ending Things . It’s not a movie that’s interested in trying to get on anyone else’s wavelength but its own, and if that’s not where you are, then you and it can go your separate ways with no hard feelings. The film has zero interest in clarification or catharsis. It’s not a puzzle so much as it is a box of random shit that you’re meant to assemble yourself. Into what, well, that’s up to you.

The movie is also a really uncomfortable watch, in the way a horror movie can be a really uncomfortable watch. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is designed to keep you off-kilter. The frames are crowded with so much busy detail that it’s overwhelming. The camera disorients your sense of time by anticipating or lagging behind the characters or cutting away at odd moments. The performances are dialed down to almost nothing, or dialed up to piercing volumes.

That they nevertheless feel like coherent characters, despite their exaggerations and un-stuck-in-time-ness, is an impressive feat of acting. Toni Collette, who plays the boyfriend’s mom, is even more unsettling here than she was in Hereditary . There, she was a woman pushed to the outer limits of grief and stress. Her extreme behavior was obvious and explicable.

Here, it’s all the more disquieting because the sense of wrongness is clear but the cause is not. Her reactions to her son’s girlfriend are appropriate in theory — a self-deprecating crack here, a welcoming giggle there — but read all off in practice. Her smile is so broad it becomes a grimace, her laugh so loud you want to back away slowly. If you’ve ever found yourself trying way too hard to impress someone, maybe you recognize yourself in her, or in the too-bright way the girlfriend returns that energy.

A friend of mine said they knew the feeling. They said that was what it felt like in their own head all the time, that sense of cold-sweat anxiety and naked desperation. Because that’s what I’m Thinking of Ending Things does: It reorganizes reality so it feels truer than objective truth. Kaufman’s gift is that he’s better than perhaps any living filmmaker at literalizing the subjective experience of existence.

The parents age and de-age and age again and de-age again over the course of the evening. The characters’ costumes keep changing, so subtly that you’re not sure at first if you’re imagining things. A janitor, whose connection to the central couple remains mysterious until the end (and maybe even then), seems to be watching them make out in their car. The thrill and the terror of the movie is that you truly never know what’s going to come next. It could be a dying cartoon pig walking a naked man down a hallway, or an ice-cold burn on the work of Robert Zemeckis, or a perfectly mundane conversation about the importance of tire chains in a snowstorm.

There’s no one key that will slide all the pins neatly into place and unlock the whole thing. It doesn’t even seem there is a key. You’re just meant to experience I’m Thinking of Ending Things , turning over the characters’ musings on hope and death (“It’s a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better,” one says darkly) or wondering why you’re so moved by a wordless ten-minute dance break in an empty school. The surreal touches feel random, but they aren’t; they’re expressing something about what it’s like to live in his brain. Or yours.

Myself, I saw I’m Thinking of Ending Things first and foremost as a film about identity, about how impossible it is to truly “be yourself” when your concept of “yourself” is tangled up in the art you’ve admired, the roles you’re expected to play, the judgments others make of you, the way your parents raised you, the people you used to be, the people you might become some day, and a million other things that have blended into your understanding of your own psyche. It’s an idea I stress about a lot even when I’m not watching a Charlie Kaufman movie, which is probably why I reached for it first here. And now you know a little something more about me.

There’s a song in Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York , barely heard, about how no one will truly know and love you for everything you are, because you have to hide away parts of yourself to make yourself seem worthy of love. But like that movie before it, I’m Thinking of Ending Things gives us the chance to know ourselves, and each other, a little bit better. If art has a purpose, I think it’s whatever Kaufman’s doing here.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is now streaming on Netflix .

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Angie Han is the Deputy Entertainment Editor at Mashable. Previously, she was the managing editor of Slashfilm.com. She writes about all things pop culture, but mostly movies, which is too bad since she has terrible taste in movies.

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I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

by Iain Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2016

Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of...

A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novel’s unnamed narrator.

Reid’s preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming so you can see how everything fits together—or, rather, falls apart. The narrator, known only as the girlfriend, is driving with her beau, Jake, a scientist, to meet his parents at the family farm. The relationship is new, but, as the title implies, she’s already thinking of calling it quits. Jake is somewhat strange and fond of philosophizing, though the tendency to speak in the abstract is something that unites the pair. The weather outside turns nastier, and Reid intercuts the couple’s increasingly tense journey with short interstitial chapters that imply a crime has been committed, though the details are vague. Matters don’t improve when Jake and the narrator arrive at the farm, a hulking collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The meeting with her potential in-laws is as awkward as it is frightening, with Reid expertly needling the reader—and the narrator—into a state of near-blind panic with every footfall on a basement step. On the drive back, Jake makes a detour to an empty high school, which will take the couple to new heights of the terrifying and the bizarre.

Pub Date: June 14, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-2692-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Iain Reid

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

IndieBound Bestseller

THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

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Screen Rant

I'm thinking of ending things review: charlie kaufman gets really existential.

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New Barbie Movie Being Discussed, But Greta Gerwig & Margot Robbie Reportedly Aren’t Thrilled

What saving private ryan's d-day scene gets wrong explained by historian, "i say this respectfully": saving private ryan's ending gets called out for 1 hollywood detail by ww2 historian.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is best known for his inventive high concept scripts that fueled acclaimed films such as  Being John Malkovich and  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . In recent years, he's also looked to make a name for himself as a director, most notably with 2015's  Anomalisa . Five years later, Kaufman is back with his first full-length live-action feature since 2008's  Synecdoche, New York with  I'm Thinking of Ending Things , based on Iain Reid's book of the same name. The material certainly fits Kaufman's sensibilities, but this time he isn't fully successful in achieving the intended effect.  I'm Thinking of Ending   Things is a suitably eerie and creepy psychological thriller that ultimately never comes together as a comprehensible whole.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things follows The Young Woman (Jessie Buckley), who goes on a trip with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their remote farmhouse. Even though The Young Woman is taking the proverbial "next step" with Jake, she doubts that the two have any real future and internally wonders what the purpose of it all is. The Young Woman's feelings become intensified as she spends more time with Jake's family and goes on a surreal emotional journey.

Related: Everything We Know About I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Despite Kaufman's penchant for sharp writing, it's  I'm Thinking of Ending Things' presentation that immediately jumps out. Lukasz Zal's cinematography and the film's aspect ratio combine to craft a style that immediately establishes the right mood and tone. The dreary environments and tight composition are very effective in putting the viewer into The Young Woman's headspace, allowing them to understand her point of view. Additionally, Kaufman's shot selection and blocking thrive at visual storytelling, fleshing out the characters' relationships by conveying key information not always present in the dialogue. The filmmaking doesn't call attention to itself; it's simply an understated approach that's compelling and elevates the final product once the viewer picks up on it.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things also benefits from a strong cast, with Buckley being the star. Her turn as The Young Woman walks a fine balance between being emotionally distant enough to encapsulate her character's state of mind, but also still be relatable so she can serve as the audience conduit. Her chemistry with Plemons doesn't endear the couple to viewers, but that's what makes it work well. Presented from The Young Woman's perspective, the two realistically feel like a couple that's just going through the motions and lack a true spark, deepening the connection viewers have with her. Collette and Thewlis also make the most of their screen time as Jake's parents, leaving an unsettling impression on the audience. Their roles are only supporting, but they contribute greatly to  I'm Thinking of Ending Things' sense of uneasiness.

Where the film falters a bit is in the narrative itself. Kaufman has never been one to shy away from complex material, and he does the same here, ambitiously tackling themes of time and human existence. That said,  I'm Thinking of Ending Things isn't the easiest book to adapt, and the story's impact lessens as time goes on. Even by Kaufman's standards, it's an unconventional tale to tell, and the various pieces never really come together to form a fully comprehensible whole. This approach does work on occasion because the viewer is meant to be in the troubled mind of The Young Woman, but there are other times where the film comes across as too abstruse. Even those who are fond of Kaufman's earlier work may have difficulty truly latching on, which makes  I'm Thinking of Ending Things a film that's easier to admire than love.

In the end,  I'm Thinking of Ending Things is hardly accessible entertainment, but it will likely find its niche audience on Netflix. Streaming is the ideal platform for a movie like this (even if there wasn't an ongoing pandemic), giving it more of a chance to stand out than if it had released in theaters. It'll be interesting to see if  I'm Thinking of Ending Things has any luck for Netflix on the awards circuit later this year, but even if it doesn't score the accolades Kaufman's other films have, it's still a fascinating watch with plenty to unpack. How much mileage an individual viewer gets out of it will vary, though there's still enough here to hold one's interest.

More: I'm Thinking of Ending Things Official Trailer

I'm Thinking of Ending Things starts streaming on Netflix on September 4, 2020. It runs 134 minutes and is rated R for language including some sexual references.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments!

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a Netflix original movie that was released in September 2020. The story centers on a young woman who decides to visit her boyfriend's parents' mysterious farm. But after arriving, she realizes he's not the man she thought he was. I'm Thinking of Ending Things stars Jesse Plemmons and Jessie Buckley and is directed by Charlie Kaufman.

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‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Isn’t Actually That Complicated

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TRIGGER WARNING: The following contains references to suicide.

The Big Picture

• Charlie Kaufman's film I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a bizarre and surreal adaptation of Iain Reid's novel, showcasing Kaufman's unique storytelling style.
• The film revolves around Jake and his girlfriend Lucy as they take a road trip to visit Jake's parents, but things take a morbid turn as the evening unfolds.
• Jake's mental state, depression, and contemplation of suicide are central themes in the film, portrayed through the characters of Lucy and the elderly janitor.

Only someone as sly and subversive as Charlie Kaufman could pull off an adaptation of Iain Reid ’s surrealist horror novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things . Charlie Kaufman is one of the most idiosyncratic storytellers working in Hollywood today. Kaufman has an aptitude for telling stories that are both egregiously silly and deeply tragic. While Kaufman’s screenwriting credits on Adaptation and Being John Malkovich were certainly strange, his solo directorial films like I'm Thinking of Ending Things are even more bizarre.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

This psychological thriller follows a young woman on a road trip to meet her boyfriend's parents at their secluded farm. As a snowstorm intensifies outside, the visit becomes increasingly unsettling, revealing that nothing is as it seems. The film intricately explores themes of identity, time, and memory through surreal storytelling.

What Is 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' About?

I’m Thinking of Ending Things follows the young man Jake ( Jesse Plemons ) and his girlfriend Lucy ( Jessie Buckley ) as they take a road trip to see his parents over Thanksgiving. Their conversations begin to feel morbid when Lucy recites a disturbing poem about her sense of depression. The evening gets even more bizarre when Jake’s mother ( Toni Collette ) and father ( David Thewlis ) begin changing forms and starting erratic conversations. Simultaneously, the footage is intercut with an elderly janitor who is cleaning up a school.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things can be overwhelming on a first watch; there are overt references and allusions to A Beautiful Mind, A Woman Under The Influence, Oklahoma!, the works of William Wordsmith , the film criticism of Pauline Kael, and even “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” However, the only piece of literature you really need to understand the film’s message is Reid’s original novel. While Reid’s novel is more explicit in its twist ending, the interviews that Kaufman and the film’s cast have given following its 2020 Netflix release suggest that it’s not quite as clear .

What's Going On in Jake’s Mind Throughout 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things'?

While I'm Thinking of Ending Things is told from Lucy's perspective, she is simply a Tyler Durden-esque extension of Jake. As Jake reveals in his conversation with his parents, he considered approaching a girl at a trivia night event and asking her out. While the real Jake never actually approached this young woman, the film is an extension of a fantasy in which he did. Jake is trying to imagine what his perfect life with this girl (whose name keeps changing because he can’t decide on one) would look like; he’s unsure when he wants to introduce her to his parents, which explains why they keep changing ages.

To take things one step further, Jake is actually the same elderly janitor that we see interspersed throughout the story. This older man is now reflecting on the mistakes of his youth as he contemplates the end of his life. Based on Jake’s morbid conversations with his girlfriend, he seems to be contemplating suicide due to his depression. At the end of the film, Jake’s car disappears from the school parking lot, leaving only the janitor’s truck. We see the janitor’s truck covered in snow and eventually hear the sounds of an approaching vehicle and snow being scraped. This would imply that the janitor’s truck was left in the parking lot after he ended his life over the school’s Thanksgiving break .

Is Lucy Real in 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things'?

While Reid’s novel makes it explicitly clear that “Lucy” is not real, Kaufman made the gamble of giving her agency. In an interview with Indiewire , Kaufman revealed that “she is a device, but I wanted her to be able to separate herself from that.” I’m Thinking of Ending Things questions whether a fantasy can exist in its own right, as Jake has imagined an extensive backstory for his idealized girlfriend. While she may be based off of the girl he was too afraid to approach at the trivia night event, it’s possible that she is an amalgamation of the various women he’s been attracted to throughout his life (which would explain why her name keeps changing).

Kaufman also revealed that he “really liked the idea that even within his fantasy, he cannot have what he wants.” Since Jake is being fickle and keeps changing his mind, there are sudden jumps in time and place. The conversations he has with his girlfriend are often cut off, as if Jake is arguing with himself. It’s also possible that since these are the reflections of an older man, he does not have a firm grasp on his memory.

'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' Alludes to Other Media

The literary, musical, and cinematic allusions in I’m Thinking of Ending Things can be explained by a scene in Jake’s bedroom; when he’s showing his childhood room to his girlfriend, we catch a collection of movies, poems, stories, and books, including Pauline Kael’s 1996 essay collection For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies . Lucy begins repeating some of Kael’s words and mannerisms, specifically her infamously scathing review of John Cassavette ’s A Woman Under The Influence . Jake also talks about David Foster Wallace ’s essay from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which contributes to the sense of doom, as Wallace himself died by suicide in 2008.

It’s also revealed in Jake’s conversations in the car that he is a fan of musicals. We see allusions to what is likely one of his favorites when he stands before the stage and delivers a rendition of “Lonely Home” from Oklahoma! It’s a fitting selection; the song itself is about the romantic longing of a man, and the musical itself conforms to very regressive gender roles. Jake’s musical fantasy continues in the stunning fantasy dance number where a younger janitor dances with a woman representing his girlfriend.

As for the animated talking pig, this appears to be connected to the farmland that Jake was showing his girlfriend earlier in the film; the memory of his childhood has now become distorted and near-death. The teenage girls working at the ice cream parlor seem to gaggle and whisper about Jake, suggesting that they are also an amalgamation of the various cashiers Jake has talked to over the years.

How Does 'I'm Thinking About Ending Things' Reference 'A Beautiful Mind'?

The humorous cut to credits after an older Jake stands before the crowd and accepts a Nobel Peace Prize is a replication of the ending scene of A Beautiful Mind with John Nash ( Russell Crowe ). Similar to A Beautiful Mind , both Jake and the audience members are wearing not very convincing old-age makeup effects. A Beautiful Mind is often criticized for being a manipulative, cheesy Hollywood production that feels like “Oscar bait,” which likely would have appealed to someone like Jake. It’s also a film that is about schizophrenia, where the central character imagines having interactions with people that aren’t there.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a great film to analyze, but it doesn’t just rely on its massive twist. It’s a deeply tragic film that has empathy for its titular character, while also showing the faults within his thinking. As far as surrealist films about mental illness go, I’m Thinking of Ending Things weaves the line between being unnerving and emotional.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

Watch on Netflix

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• Charlie Kaufman

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things review – The Kaufman Experience

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, or as I have named it The Kaufman Experience , is a masterclass in surrealist filmmaking.

This review of I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix) is spoiler-free.

There “ain’t” no yellow brick road running through Glasgow   Spoilerville , is probably what anyone is thinking after watching a Charlie Kaufman film; however, you just can’t stop talking about it. I mean, how can you possibly spoil something you don’t understand that is open to so many interpretations? A young woman has the same issue. I mean, she never stops talking about what she doesn’t understand and why something feels off. So much so, she keeps muttering to herself that she wants to end things, but doesn’t quite know why. She then repeats it so much that her boyfriend, Jake, he keeps thinking she said something and denies it. She is quiet, withdrawn, seems depressed, but it doesn’t seem like anything Patsy Klein can fix in a film that feels like such an odd-duck of a dream — a feel of a Mulholland Drive with a Kaufmanesque touch.

There is something seriously off about their relationship. Sure, the Young Woman ( Wild Rose’s  Jessie Buckley) thinks Jake (Jesse Plemons) is nice, sweet, sensitive, smart, and unlike most men, he listens intently (what a pig), but something’s so off she can’t possibly put it into words… and she’s a poet or an artist or physicist, who knows really. She is about to meet the parents and find out why things feel off with Jake. His mother (the great Toni Collette) is the nervous type that laughs at stressful situations and has the endearing habit of mispronouncing at least one word every time she talks. His father (David Thewlis) interrupts often and seems inebriated, frankly. However, he can spot a plot flaw in a story from a mile away.

Like his most classic films, Kaufman’s script in  I’m Thinking of Ending Things  makes you question what is real and what is not. What does the young woman’s existence mean to the world she is in, to Jake, and to his parents? Conversely, what does the young woman and Jake’s coupling mean to the world they are currently living in? He does all this as if the characters are stuck inside a snow globe, and you shake up time, cause, and effect with all the possibilities that can come from it— the rest is left up to your own interpretation.

Furthermore, he has taken over being the master of juxtaposition, since Tim Burton abandoned the title years ago. He is so good at it here and he places so many eye-catching moments and figures everywhere (just go with me here) that there are contrasts and comparisons of greater happenings right in front of the viewer. We don’t realize what’s unfolding; there are too many Easter eggs to count and it’s impossible to spot them all, which demands repeated viewing.

Kaufman’s script for I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based on the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated horror thriller by Iain Reid of the same name. The first third of the film is very funny without being outlandish and has such expertly timed delivery that it doubles with rich insight into the film’s story and characters. For instance, after telling a long story of how the young woman and Jake met, the young woman says, “God, it feels like six weeks ago; even longer.” The film then parallels, while not as horror-centric as Reid’s well-crafted tale, as a psychological nightmare that feels unsettling. Finally, the pairing with Kaufman’s vision captures multiple interpretations, something the book is praised for, and for me, seems to be one obvious choice. Many may not agree with me. Others may have their own spin, which is what makes this adaption so brilliant.

If you thought or had been afraid Buckley was a one-trick pony, let me put your fears to rest. She is a major talent. The film rests on her shoulders to take you through what I’m interpreting as Robert Plutchik’s pairing of eight primary emotions: joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation (You see? Even Buckley’s performance is layered with juxtaposition). Collette’s part is perfect for her and has great meaning, but I would like to point out the invaluable and underappreciated Jesse Plemons. His Jake is the young woman’s emotional straight man, and his part is played with such selfless representation that when he shows any emotion it’s delivered with a surprising intensity (anger-fear). It’s the kind of role you won’t realize how important it was until you watch the movie again. His scene to close the movie may have you scratching your head, but it’s a haunting one.

I’m being intentionally vague here to not give away spoilers, and I would like anyone who watches Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things to have their own mind open to their own theories. His film touches on themes that are most important to us and the regret of what we take for granted. The film has a delicate psychological balance that gives it a haunting edge. His adaption of Iain Reid’s is a love letter to his very own interpretation of Reid’s work, equipped with tense motifs and a dream ballet. It’s an exercise in (insert your own theory here) and is a masterclass in modern surrealist filmmaking.

READ: Top 5 Movies Defying Film Genres

Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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I'm thinking of ending things.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 4 Reviews
• Kids Say 17 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Talky, tense, time-shifting mystery has strong language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a purposefully disconcerting film. Younger audiences might tune out, not understand, or not be interested in long dialogue sequences that cite and debate classic films, books, poetry, and songs. The film seems to be toying with the idea of time…

Why Age 15+?

"F--k." "S--t." "Bulls--t." "A--hole." "Crap/crappy." "T-t." "God." "Jesus." "He

Jake's father says that the boy's twin bed from childhood is "not for f--king."

No scenes of physical violence beyond dead farm animals and a dance performance

Jake and the woman discuss roofies. Adults drink wine with dinner, and Jake sugg

The couple discuss several known films, books, songs, and poems.

Any Positive Content?

It's OK to say no -- for women to say no to male suitors, to men controlling the

The young woman is polite to Jake's parents even when they're behaving very stra

"F--k." "S--t." "Bulls--t." "A--hole." "Crap/crappy." "T-t." "God." "Jesus." "Hell." "Sissies."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Jake's father says that the boy's twin bed from childhood is "not for f--king." The young woman tells the story of how she and Jake met and at one point says she thinks the "sex was good."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

No scenes of physical violence beyond dead farm animals and a dance performance ending with an acted death, but entire film plays with suspense of something violent happening. A basement that's taped off and has scratches on the door. A potentially dangerous drive through a blizzard. People behaving strangely, warning the woman off. A final ominous stop at an apparently abandoned high school.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Jake and the woman discuss roofies. Adults drink wine with dinner, and Jake suggests she drank a lot because his dad was topping off her glass without her noticing. The woman suddenly has a cigarette in the car as she recites a mid-century film review in a somewhat pretentious way.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

It's OK to say no -- for women to say no to male suitors, to men controlling them, or to get out of a potentially dangerous situation. Films, books, poetry can have relevance in our daily lives. Being smart is a positive, potentially attractive quality.

Positive Role Models

The young woman is polite to Jake's parents even when they're behaving very strangely. She's kind to everyone she meets. Jake lulls her into danger.

Parents need to know that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a purposefully disconcerting film. Younger audiences might tune out, not understand, or not be interested in long dialogue sequences that cite and debate classic films, books, poetry, and songs. The film seems to be toying with the idea of time-shifting and a lack of an "objective reality," as none of the characters are as they seem, and even the details of the life of the young woman narrating the story through an internal monologue shift throughout the tale. The film creates an intentionally uneasy mood with the settings: a stuffy car on a snowy drive, a farmhouse seemingly stuck in time, an abandoned high school. Despite a lack of physical violence, the sense that something terrible is going to happen is there for pretty much the full two hours. Adults drink wine, smoke cigarettes, and discuss roofies. The woman mentions sex, and the man's father says that a twin bed isn't for "f--king." Other language includes "s--t," "bulls--t," "a--hole," "crap/crappy," "t-t," "god," "Jesus," "hell," "sissies." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (17)

Based on 4 parent reviews

Just . . . no.

What's the story.

A young woman ( Jessie Buckley ) accompanies her boyfriend, Jake ( Jesse Plemons ), to visit his parents on their farm in I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS. She's questioning the rationale for making this trip when she's already considering calling off their relationship, and the two do seem a mismatched pair. On a snowy drive out of the city, they struggle to find topics to talk about naturally, and we start to get the sense something isn't right. Details about her own life start to get fuzzy, and the farm, which feels stuck in time, adds to her unease. Jake's parents begin to age and then grow younger practically in front of her eyes. She finally convinces Jake to leave, in a near blizzard, but it's not at all clear she'll make it back to the city or to the life she was leading until now.

Is It Any Good?

This is a highly esoteric film that will surely find its fans, but could also feel too talky, too strange, and too confusing for many others. The twisting plot and myriad cultural references and internal clues may excite some viewers and send them down Reddit rabbit holes to dissect it all, but they require patience and attention. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman seems to drop hints about the film's meaning without actually explaining anything. "There is no objective reality." "I guess that's what one hopes for when one writes things ... universality in the specific." Watching too many movies is a "societal malady." "It's all planned ... yet it isn't thought out."

I'm Thinking of Ending Things ponders the bending of time, the glorification of youth and beauty, the relevance of poetry in our lives, feminist readings of classic films and songs, dating and relationships, political correctness, and, if you can believe it, more. Also, it may suggest hell is high school, or maybe watching a high school musical. Despite all that, you get the sense that the film is more about a mood (an ominous malaise, also skillfully captured visually) than a clear message. The talented lead actors, Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, take their roles seriously and keep you engaged, which is lucky considering there are 20-minute sequences of just them talking in a car. Toni Collette and David Thewlis are perfect as the weirdo parents. Still, you may find yourself wishing Kaufman had ended things -- meaning, this two-hour-plus movie -- a little sooner.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what happens to the young woman in I'm Thinking of Ending Things . The film leaves much up to interpretation, so what's your take on what happened and what it all means?

What authors, films, and other works mentioned in the film did you recognize?

A character says humans are the only animals aware of their mortality -- they can't live in the present, so they "invented hope." What do you make of this comment?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : September 4, 2020
• Cast : Jessie Buckley , Toni Collette , Jesse Plemons
• Director : Charlie Kaufman
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Likely Story
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 134 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

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What to watch next.

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