Charlie Kaufman’s screen adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a journey of peculiarity and fright
I’m Thinking of Ending Things debuted on Netflix on Sept. 4, amassing positive reviews from critics. It tells the story of a young woman already detached in her month-long relationship who is thinking of ending it. Or so she claims.
The narrator is unreliable, but so is the setting. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a fascinating film in which none of the characters, narration, or visuals offered on screen are trustworthy. The film torments the viewer, purposely mangling any hope for consistency or a fair chance to figure out its “big” twist. Conversations are disjointed — starting with thought then finishing in spoken word, as if Jake, the male lead, is privy to everything Lucy, the young woman, thinks.
Director Charlie Kaufman believably positions his adaptation of the 2016 novel of the same name as a psychological horror in the making, placing the female lead with an unstable partner. Just as he is with her thoughts, Jake seems aware that Lucy’s respect for him diminishes and is reinvigorated often. While he isn’t physically violent toward her, one of the earlier scenes shows him leading her into his family’s barn where frozen pigs are a feast for maggots. He then walks her past the basement door inside his childhood home which has clearly been clawed at, as if someone was trying to break in. The unsettling music and disjointed transitions beg the viewer to worry for Lucy’s safety. Is she a looming murder victim? A woman battling hallucinatory psychosis or reliving trauma? Neither, but the erratic behaviour of Jake’s parents did little to soothe my worries.
Once inside Jake’s childhood home, it also becomes apparent that time isn’t functioning in a familiar way. If time is used to measure the gaps between events, then Kaufman has successfully deconstructed its passage by turning it pliable. Many of the clothes and background objects have a dated quality, despite Lucy’s iPhone suggesting that they’re in a current era. Snow appears to be one of the few clues to determine setting — at least we can tell that the season is winter.
But time is only one fluid element of the film. Lucy’s wardrobe, hairstyle, and name are ever shifting figments, like shadows on the ground. Within the first 40 minutes, her sweater shifts from orange, to purple, to green, to a dress. A dog leaps at her one moment, only to be seen memorialized in an urn the next. Not even the characters are reliably corporeal — Jake’s mother and father age and de-age between conversations, seemingly ghostly and frenetic. Are they imagined figments coexisting with Lucy in an asylum? Are they ghostly apparitions only she and Jake can interact with?
Even Lucy’s cellphone doesn’t ring properly; there’s an echoey, shrill quality to it that sounds like a landline chiming in an empty room. In the second half of the film, it becomes clearer that Jake’s present form is the ill-favoured janitor of a high school, and the sound of the phone could actually be the one of the phones from the classrooms he frequents to clean. But no answers are cleanly offered as to why everything has a dreamlike quality; instead, the viewers are expected to do some interpretation.
By the end of the film, Jake feels like a man afraid to be the main character in his own story, instead placing the burden on a woman he hoped would love him but who he realized could never satisfy the loneliness he’s made for himself. What Lucy was thinking of ending doesn’t matter because it seems Jake had tired of his everchanging fantasy, only to recommit to it by the end. While the twist makes his motives more understandable, Jake remains a difficult character to pity, like someone you care about who continues making the same mistakes. The dreamlike unclarity could be Jake’s descent into dementia, following in the steps of his parents, or could be his own inability to abandon the past as he reimagines all of his missed opportunities for grandeur and recognition.
If literary adaptations loaded with symbolism and unreliable hijinks interest you, I’m Thinking of Ending Things would be a suitable choice. This sort of film requires delicate attention to detail, quick observation, and a familiarity with Kaufman’s previous works. Though I tried to scrutinize it within its two-hour-and-15-minute window, I can confidently assume that I didn’t catch everything Kaufman meticulously included.
