(Warning: contains spoilers)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a film that’s as unsettling and oppressive as its dark wintry landscape. It plays out like an elaborate nightmare, set entirely between a snow-blanketed road, a morbid farmhouse, a static high school, and an ominous ice cream parlor.
On the face of it, a young woman is invited to dinner by her boyfriend’s parents amid a treacherous winter. As they drive up to the farmhouse, the titular thought is the haunt of the woman’s mind while her boyfriend Jake eerily intercepts her musings. Although the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of their exchange are pertinent, the dialogue here is tediously pedantic. A twenty-minute interval of nothing but snow and equally smothering conversation borders on insufferable.
Things pick up when they arrive at the farmhouse. From here on, strange occurrences abound. The young woman’s name and occupation, and at one instance her face itself, are in constant flux. She gets strange phone calls from women who share her own name(s). Jake’s parents advance and regress in age multiple times in a single night. And scenes of a lonely high school janitor intersperse the apparently usual route of the film.
When the young woman stumbles into Jake’s childhood room, a glimpse of the paraphernalia littering his shelves provides a major clue. To the keen viewer, the crux of the film starts to become apparent. Every scene is an exaggeration of one man’s experiences stacked up through a lifetime, from the books and movies he consumed in his youth, to a stranger’s eye he caught at a bar years ago. It is an embodiment of fears and regrets of a life wasted away, structured like a fantasy but dotted with the failures he can’t seem to escape.
What really takes the storytelling up a notch is hearing it in the voice of the young woman. Naturally, the viewer assumes that it’s her world, her thoughts and her perspective they’re peeping in on. Kaufman has quite successfully made the young woman a very real entity. We experience her own journey of trying to make sense of the situation, of being trapped in someone else’s mind, complete with ominous warnings and forebodings. It makes that slow burn singe just a little more.
Every event that takes a turn for the stranger fills you with growing dread. You’re desperate for a resolution, an escape, some sort of release. Which ultimately comes, in a way. The young woman meets the janitor and we’re told exactly what happened the night they met. It’s a bittersweet meeting tinged with heavy acceptance. A dream-like ballet sequence follows, one of the most enchanting scenes of the movie. It’s poetic and torturous and a perfect microcosm of the entire film. This lonely man’s fantasy is ultimately thwarted by reality, and Jake finally lets go of both the young woman and his barely-lived life.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not about the ending, the logic of each inexplicable scene, or figuring out the plot. It’s a journey of complex human emotion too uncomfortable to acknowledge. Kaufman forces you to confront them in this almost hypnotic sequence of events, which is quite commendable.
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