I'm Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman creates a wonderfully odd, meet-the-parents fever dream

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A-minus

Does anyone in Hollywood do relationship and/or free floating anxiety and existential angst better than writer/director  Charlie Kaufman?  

Fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, questions about relationships and the self are some of the questions that he raises in in his latest, the deliciously Freudian I’m Thinking of Ending Things, adapted from Kingston, Ontario author Iain Reid’s novel. 

Meeting the parents is always awkward.

The Oscar winning screenwriter’s singular style has been behind some of the most innovative story telling of the last few decades, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich (both directed by Spike Jonze), The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (for which he won the Oscar) and a a few he’s directed, including Synecdoche, New York, and, most recently, 2015’s stop-motion animated Anomalisa. This film, only the fourth that he’s both written and directed, doesn’t disappoint. 

 The film involves a young woman (British actress Jessie Buckley), who’s studying to be a physicist, and is an accomplished amateur poet. She isn’t given a name (although her boyfriend Jake refers to her at one point as Ames, or Amy, her name in the credits is “The Young Woman.”) 

 She’s heading to meet her Jake’s parents who have invited her to dinner on their farm a longish drive away. The two have been dating for less than two months, so meeting his folks is a big step. We hear her talk about their relationship in unequivocally positive terms exactly once, at the beginning of the film as she’s waiting for him to pick her up. But as the movie goes on, you wonder if you even heard it correctly.

School teacher Jake (Jesse Plemons) seems like a lovely man, polite, attentive, thoughtful, responsive to her interests. He even quotes poetry.

There are some pressures on the evening beyond the obvious parental-meeting anxiety.  They’re on a long-ish drive on a very snowy night, and she needs to be home at the end of the evening to prepare for something in the morning to do with work or school. She mentions it frequently and he assures her it will all work out. 

This conversation, and others, happen in real time. But we also hear her inner dialogue. A rush of thoughts that seem to change direction from time to time. She loves him, or is thinking that she might love him, or wondering whether she does love him.  She is thinking of ending things, meaning the relationship. Or is she?

Then there’s his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), in whose company things go from the politely odd to the surreal, and back again. Can anything regress your partner to strange quirky childish and worrisome behaviours more quickly than going back to the family home? 

The technique of using inner dialogue is something Kaufman has used before to great effect to reflect the main character’s crippling self doubts. In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, her thoughts stop responding to the straight-ahead narrative and start to jump around without attention to time and space, taking us with them. 

By the time the couple arrives at Jake’s parents’ house the lines between reality, fantasy and metaphor have blurred, and get even blurrier in the film’s final third. 

Holy Freud, Batman!

There is a point in any relationship where you have to make decisions about whether you will go with it. But then come the big questions, including, ‘Who is this person, really?’ Can you ever really know another person? Is a relationship a kind of coin toss where you’re betting that the person you know today is who they really are. Or will you find out some dark secrets in the future, about their oddness, or their weakness or something darker? And then, who are you in all of this.   

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, with its inner dialogue, magical realism, and playful, random time-shift perspectives, leaves much to interpretation for the viewer.

For this viewer it’s a look at how the course of looking for true love can run us through the valley of deep insecurity and fear, and how our deepest anxiety will rise up to greet our highest hopes in the never-ending quest for happiness. 

What’s miraculous is that, through it all, Kaufman stays on course in a movie that is as intriguing as it is wonderfully odd.

 I’m Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Starring Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis. Begins streaming on Netflix on September 4th, 2020.