I'm Thinking of Ending Things Netflix Movie Review

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix
Written by: Charlie Kaufman (written for the screen by), Iain Reid (based on the book by)
Directed by: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
Rated: R
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Plot
Full of misgivings, a young woman travels with her new boyfriend to his parents' secluded farm. Upon arriving, she comes to question everything she thought she knew about him, and herself.

Verdict
We experience the story second hand with a massive misdirection. It's difficult to piece together what's happening because you're looking for the wrong things. You may piece it together by the end, but you may need help. This is a movie made to confuse and bewilder. Once I read what was happening (after considering whether this was worth finishing), I really liked the story, but the movie doesn't make it easy on you. What's happening doesn't begin to be revealed until very late in the movie.
It depends.

Review
Kaufman makes such interesting movies that ruminate on life. Anomalisa pondered humans and uniqueness through the perspective of a man alienated from the world.

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons play the woman and Jake.

The themes and style of this movie are in line with Synecdoche, a movie that is either extremely complex or excellent at seeming complex. This movie plays with the some complexity, but compounds it by obscuring the plot. As adept as I usually am at figuring out a movie, this one was just out of my reach until I looked it up. Many of my guesses were correct, but I was missing a major element.

This starts with a woman contemplating ending her relationship with her recent boyfriend, Jake. Reviewing this movie, it's easier to pick out the clues, but on first watch there's a lot of guessing. Is the janitor a new character, Jake, or an image of a life that could be?

Jake's parents.

Jake seems to hear his girlfriend's thoughts. He also redirects a lot of her questions. What's coincidence and what's intentional?

I expect a Kaufman movie to be weird, but with this it's hard to figure out what kind of weird. Jake calls his girlfriend Louisa, then Lucy. Photos change, Jake's parents change, and the conversations over dinner are very odd. Time no longer has an anchor in the movie as this becomes a psychological horror.

With the waitress in a movie the janitor is watching stating "You don't have to go forward in time." I wondered if this movie is a rumination on what a relationship leads to and how it plays out. The couple grows old, stories are forgotten, and events are misremembered. I was close, but not quite right.

This is needlessly complicated and quite pretentious. While I usually like pretentious, I just wasn't sure if my guesses as to what's going on were correct and what I was supposed to get from this.

I had to look up the plot, and once I realized the key to this movie it became immediately more interesting. I fell into assuming this could be viewed from the standpoint of a typical movie, but the foundation of how I saw this movie has no basis and the movie directly tricks us.

The trick here is that our point of view is a character that doesn't exist. While this has some clues like her lack of a name and inconsistent personality, I don't know if I would have determined what's happening without help. The movie is a stream of consciousness from Jake who is an elderly janitor. Reality bleeds into his fantasy of the girl that never was who still haunts him. She is his idealized girl, smart but not too smart. Through this character we explore the crevices of Jake's mind. This girl becomes the girl he saw in a movie, because this is a fantasy he returns to often and it's influenced by whatever is on his mind that day. This explains the exaggeration of his parents personality because we see things how Jake perceives them or remember them.

What makes his narrative odd is that he's imagining himself in a relationship, but his mind can't sustain it and she still wants to leave him. He's left hoping for a moment that never was and even in his dreams insecurities surface. He perceives his life as a failure, full of missed hopes and dreams. Jake is the one thinking of ending things. As smart as he imagined himself to be, as much as his parents made over him, life didn't end up quite like he hoped. His life is a tragedy.