Charlie Kaufman goes full Charlie Kaufman in his very unsettling and opaque adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
DISCLAIMER: You won’t like this movie.
Actually, I don’t know if you will like the movie or not. I actually quite enjoyed it. Theoretically, you could love it. Yet, it is the type of movie that tends to elicit visceral disdain from people who don’t like it, and when I think of any specific person that I know who reads this blog, I would hesitate to recommend it without a ton of caveats. It is slow, and ambiguous, and while I am confident that it very much has a specific meaning that each creative choice supports, I, a person who analyzes movies online (for a month out of the year, anyway) am unsure what that meaning is. If you are familiar with Charlie Kaufman’s work as a writer on Being John Malkovich or Adaptation, you have some understanding of how he plays with form and narrative, but this is further yet down that rabbit hole. He directs here as well, and that just gives him more control to challenge and confound the viewer.
The basic set up of the film is that a young woman is travelling with her boyfriend to meet his parents at the farm where he grew up. She isn’t in love with him, and its unclear if she ever was (it’s a pretty short courtship at this point), but she doesn’t seem to have much conviction either way. Her inner monologue is the source of the title, repeated frequently like a mantra, although as you might imagine, it isn’t so clear if that surface reading is the one we should take away by the end of the film. Things feel a little off during their very long car ride through the snowy weather, but as soon as they get to the farm the uneasiness escalates exponentially. The film plays tricks with time and with which character’s perspective we are meant to be seeing, employs tactics akin to an unreliable narrator, and shows us the same characters in incongruous, impossible to reconcile settings. The horror here is of the David Lynch variety, none of the overt trappings of the genre are present but the anxiety it sows stays with you long after the impact from your typical stalk-and-slash or movie monster. And while I wasn’t lying when I said I was unsure of the meaning of it all, I actually have a much better idea than I did the first time I watched Mulholland Drive.
So here’s where the review stays spoiler-free and wraps up, or I spend another thousand words laying out my theories. The precedent I’ve set, and my own preference towards reading these types of reviews leads me down the first path, so you’ll have to track me down in real life if you want to hear my thoughts. This is definitely the type of movie that is best experienced without any specific knowledge so you can try to find your own way through the surrealism and discern the meaning for yourself. All you should know is that the acting is uniformly excellent, the direction is evocative and interesting even in the draggier parts, and you can’t trust anything you think the film is showing you. Who knows, maybe you can’t even trust my bold disclaimer above.
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