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 there’s much more to this than the short synopsis reveals.        

Kaufman punctuates the sparse central narrative with several surrealist visual sequences, which are mostly fun and interesting, as well as lengthy monologues on esoteric academia, which mostly aren’t. A lot of the latter are loaded into the two driving sections, where Plemons and Buckley talk past each other about physics, biology, theatre, film and media criticism, the work of David Foster Wallace, psychology, poetry, and more and more and more, on and on and on, giving you plenty to think about but not a lot to look at, or care for. The opening twenty minutes will defeat a lot of casual Netflix viewers, I think.  

If you can make it through that car ride though, there are plenty of treats to be found at the parents’ family farm (few of the characters are named, at least permanently). Kaufman turns out to be a capable horror filmmaker in more ways than just psychological, building unease into dread and eventually panic by cranking up the claustrophobic surrealism, mashing a lifetimes worth of horrible family dinners into one staggeringly uncomfortable evening. Every slight social dissonance is magnified by some slick camerawork, and the eye-swivelling performances from Thewlis and Collette, who nail a type of overly-friendly hospitality that immediately makes you want to leave.         

Its sequences like this that make you wish the film was more consistent. Kaufman can communicate so much with his camera, set design and editing, that it’s all the more frustrating when he keeps stopping to give you monologues without much filmmaking to hold your interest. Almost half of this movie is people talking in a car! And when I say people I really mean person, because Kaufman still hasn’t figured out how to get out of his own head and into the lives of others. For a filmmaker of such talent there’s a startling lack of empathy or generosity in his work, which leaves it up to the viewer to find things to identify with.

Still it’s hard to think of a film this year that is as uncompromising and inventive as I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The good bits really do stick in your mind, especially a magnificent dance sequence towards the finale; you just have to sit through a few boring car rides to get to them. We’ve all been there before.