The Big Picture

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a film that delves into the anxieties and uncertainties of meeting your partner’s parents, adding a layer of existential dread. The narrative of the film follows a young woman who gradually realizes the disconnection from reality experienced by her partner, Jake, as his mind becomes increasingly untethered. Charlie Kaufman’s use of subtle and gradual disorientation in the film creates a tense and eerie atmosphere, making the audience question their perception of reality and immersing them in the subjective experience of intrusive thoughts.

Is there anything worse than meeting your partner’s parents? Probably, but pop culture has taught us that there is no hell on Earth quite like having to meet your potential in-laws. From The In-Laws to Meet the Parents to the recent You People, the journey of getting to know the parents and prove yourself as a worthy partner for their wonderful offspring is somehow worse than actual prison sentences and living in Florida combined. But you know what would make such a scenario even worse? Hard-core existential dread and the realization of how finite and malleable our perception of life itself is, that is if you take Charlie Kaufman and his film I’m Thinking of Ending Things at its word. Considering Kaufman’s pedigree when it comes to stories of perceptions of reality crumbling around his characters, I’m inclined to believe you should.

What Is ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ About?
Image via Netflix

This is the tale of a young woman (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons), a couple going on a road trip to meet Jake’s parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette). Along the way, they’ll engage in numerous conversations that touch on ideas that range from the poetic to the philosophical to the mundane realities of being in a relationship. When they get to the parents’ house, they’re met with parents who seem to be talking through them rather than with them while also constantly changing appearance, a dog that won’t stop shaking, a foreboding basement with unexplainable laundry, and children’s photos that don’t match with how Jake looks. Once this is over, the couple goes for another drive, where he tells her about things she doesn’t remember, and she claims she drank too much wine and talks at length about A Woman Under the Influence while doing a perfect Pauline Kael impression. They stop for ice cream, then stop at a high school to throw the ice cream away, only to notice a creepy old custodian watching them, and Jake chases him into the school. Once Jake and the woman get into the school, they discover…total annihilation.

Everything I just told you is also a lie, and not in the sense that this is a fictional movie. It is fiction within fiction, a fantasia dreamed up by a sad old custodian before committing suicide. Jake (if that’s even his real name) is experiencing an increasing disconnection from reality as his mind becomes increasingly untethered, grab-bagging people and images and influences from his life clashing together in an attempt to make peace with himself. His parents are presumably the twisted false memory versions of his actual parents, young “Jake” is probably what he used to look like, the woman could be a girl he used to be into, if not almost any girl from his past life, and so on. This man built his own happy place full of his favorite film books and musicals and repressed family memories, only to crumple it together and throw it in the trash as a kind of pyrrhic therapy. Not since Stay has a film been so bold in its complete immersion in the full potential of the subjectivity of the human experience. It’s a far closer approximation to how we experience intrusive thoughts in real life compared to most films where memories and thoughts are easily organized flashbacks.

What Is Happening to Jake’s Mind in ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’?
Image via Netflix

Jake’s mind is so split apart that he isn’t even the main character of his own story. Part of the brilliance of I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ narrative is how Jessie Buckley becomes our actual anchor; it is through her perspective that we’re gradually led through this waking dream. It takes what could otherwise be a seemingly random series of unfortunate events and turns it into a paranoia thriller where the pressure cooker of each moment rises, with our protagonist the only one who can piece it together. The woman is at once a helpless construct of an unwell mind and the only person with true agency in the story, able to investigate and peek behind the curtain while everyone else in this world is helplessly trapped in the Matrix. She is the one who goes down into the spooky basement when Jake explicitly tells her not to go down there, and when she goes to the school and finds the real old Jake there doing his job, she is the person who can reach through to him and tell him that it’s okay to do what he’s been thinking of doing. It’s also telling that young Jake, who is arguably the closest representation of how Jake feels in real life, is a passive and sullen man bogged down by his simultaneous obligation to his connections and his deep resentment and irritation with the very people he’s devoted to.

What Makes ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ So Effective?
Image via Netflix

Charlie Kaufman is usually respected more as a screenwriter for films like Synecdoche, New York, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation, all explorations into humans pushing up against the limits of their sense of reality in order to arrive at an emotional truth they desperately need. While Kaufman has always been fixated on questioning the boundaries by which we perceive our world, he has never been as overtly chaotic in his cinematic approach to it as he is with this film. Much like how there’s a stereotypical way that audiences expect somebody to act “crazy,” there’s a certain style we associate with films that seek a manic and out-of-control experience; think films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Clean, Shaven, or Jacob’s Ladder, all of which go for a full-on sensory assault designed to completely disorient the audience and make you feel like anything could happen at any moment.

With I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman, instead, goes for a “frog in boiling water” gradual approach, more along the lines of something like Shutter Island. Rather than drown us in bizarre stylization and off-the-wall behavior from the start, he presents us with reasonably plausible scenarios that always go awry and uncanny very quickly. He uses primarily the editing and camera placement to convey a shiftiness and stilted congestion in which all conversations are happening either too haphazardly fast or egregiously drawn out and uncertain. The cameras will often overemphasize negative space around a character, or edit shots together in a way where eyesight between characters is barely meeting and lines of dialogue are cutting each other off and at cross purposes with each other. This does two things: first, it makes it so that there is no true rhythm to any of the conversations, underlining the notion that these are not human beings sharing space but symbols and archetypes battling against each other for space in an ever-dwindling world; second, it adds an underlying level of tension to every little action, having us as the audience peek around every corner and eyeball every open pathway, as if we’re in a ghost story where the ghosts were never truly alive in the first place.

RELATED: James Gunn and Charlie Kaufman Almost Made a Cannibalistic ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Reboot

What Makes the Existentialism in Charlie Kaufman’s ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Different?
Image via Netflix

In terms of exposure to existentialist philosophy, films have usually limited themselves to dialogue about the topic, overt discussions usually among twenty-somethings on the cusp of adulthood that would fit in a Richard Linklater film. Films are usually more comfortable engaging with existentialism as a convenient coverup for the typical anxieties of everyday living, people trying to make sense of why they’re struggling in life. Few films have the gall to approach their entire artistic construction as one giant metaphor for the notion that every individual person’s brain is its own universe, with its own rules and framing devices and thought systems projected onto the world around them. The elusive nature of the film’s sense of tangible reality contributes to its reputation as the kind of film that is easy to overthink and project whatever you think it’s actually about when it’s really quite simple: I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a fusion of genres, a psychological thriller wrapped in the blanket of a cringe comedy with a coat of surrealist paint thrown on top of it all, in service of bearing witness to a man becoming arbiter of his own universe, and what’s more existential than that?