I’m Thinking of Ending Things - reveiw
Right from the opening titles of I’m Thinking of Ending Things it’s made clear you’re going to need to work. The names of the movies writer/director, Charlie Kaufman, and its two leads, Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley, are so small you have to lean in and squint to read them. You’ll spend the rest of the movie like that, leaning and squinting, trying to untangle the strands of Kaufman’s latest icy, self-reflexive opus. Loosely adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, the story follows a neurotic and likely depressed woman (Buckley) who is on a road-trip to meet her newish boyfriend’s parents. Plemons is the boyfriend; David Thewlis and Toni Collette are the folks. That’s basically it as far as plot goes, there’s a long opening section in the car on the way there, a nightmarish dinner with the in-laws, and then a long drive back. The whole affair seems simple relative to the rest of Kaufman’s dense and expansive work, but anyone who’s familiar with the elements at play here knows t...