![]() ![]() She is taking a drive with her boyfriend, Jake, to visit his parents. Her coat, her job, and even her likes and dislikes change often. The Young Woman ( sometimes called Lucy, sometimes called Ames - we don’t know her real name) admits that she is having problems remembering things. Inconsistencies pop up almost from the beginning, all on purpose. ![]() I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is one of those types of movies, except we never get the big reveal - not really anyways. One that makes me wonder just what is going on right up until the big reveal. There is no one genre of movie that prefer over another, however if I were to rank my favorites, thrillers and suspense movies would be at the top. There’s a weird thrill to getting lost inside this movie, only so you can study every odd detail from new angles, over and over again.I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is a strange and unique movie that will likely leave you confused about what you just watched. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is long (two hours and 14 minutes) and often frustrating, but it’s also incredibly satisfying on rewatch, which makes its Netflix release a boon. Though he’s kept the structure of Reid’s novel, Kaufman’s obsessions and mordant views on romance bleed through every frame. This is a work of adaptation, Kaufman’s first since the multidimensional comedy Adaptation (a movie about the difficulty of adapting a novel for the screen). Through it all, Kaufman prods the viewer to consider not only the couple on screen, but also the sad dynamics that drive so many relationships: the desire to be seen as smart, independent, and accomplished, but also the deeper desire to simply not be alone. ![]() The musical Oklahoma!, an ostensibly cheerful work that contains a lot of inner darkness, is a prominent motif in the film. Sometimes, they recite reams of dialogue that seem to come out of nowhere (including excerpts from a Pauline Kael movie review). Read: Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Anomalisa’ is an agonizing love story, with puppetsĪs the story unfolds, its fuzzily defined characters see their identities shift in unforeseen ways. Reid’s novel builds to a horrifying twist, but Kaufman, who has never cared for such plotting norms, takes his movie down a more crooked road in its final act. On first viewing, the film works as a whirlwind of atmosphere more than anything else, so I noticed the hints about the janitor’s identity bread-crumbed throughout the script only after rewatching. There’s a reason the action keeps cutting to an old janitor (Guy Boyd) cleaning a high school on a lonely night shift. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is no ordinary meet-the-parents drama. This kind of subconscious-plumbing psychodrama-which derives its scares from our fears of aging, loneliness, and decay-has been a favorite of Kaufman since his first movie screenplay, 1999’s Being John Malkovich. After an awkward dinner, time begins to mutate: Buckley’s character stumbles from room to room and encounters Jake’s parents at different ages. His mother is a homebody who’s so tightly wound, she’s practically snapped in multiple scenes, she reminisces on Jake’s childhood and adulthood almost simultaneously. The second act introduces Jake’s parents, an overbearing pair played by David Thewlis and Toni Collette. Jumping between mundane dialogue and fraught internal confession is a Kaufman specialty, and every pause in the script feels rife with tension. But the woman’s inner thoughts suggest something darker is afoot-she’s thinking of ending things, knows that Jake will never meet her parents, and is on the trip only out of curiosity. The early action is largely confined to a car on a snowy country road, where our heroine (played by Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons) banter amiably while driving to the farm where he grew up. But, as with all of Kaufman’s work, so much lies beneath those genre trappings. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based on the chilling novel of the same name by Iain Reid, and is presented as a horror movie, in which a routine trip becomes a nightmare. But as a director, he’s made only three feature films in 12 years, each of them a challenging and rewarding work. He’s a celebrated screenwriter, who won an Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If that sounds confusing, or even downright hostile to the audience, well, that describes the Charlie Kaufman experience. The viewer questions what is real and what is merely the echo of memory. But the strange conversations that drive the plot feel like they’re coming from dozens of voices and a thousand different directions. Only four major characters populate Charlie Kaufman’s new film, which debuts Friday on Netflix-a woman her boyfriend, Jake and his parents, whom she’s about to meet. ![]() Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ That’s an Oscar Wilde quote.” So says the unnamed protagonist of I’m Thinking of Ending Things in one of her many internal monologues. ![]()
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