Review by Michael O’Malley
Screenwriter and occasional director Charlie Kaufman is not typically known as a mystery writer. He’s written romance, science fiction, Borges-style labyrinths, and even a biopic, but never something that could be classified as a mystery. Which makes his new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, something new for him. Typical of Kaufman, the results are neurotic and recursive and meta and absolutely nothing like what its initial minutes suggest. It’s a ride. Literally.
The movie opens on a basic, socially stomach-churning premise: Jake (Jesse Plemons) has invited his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley) to his childhood home to meet his parents for the first time, and near the beginning of the long, snow-swept drive to the farm, Lucy realizes that she’s more or less made up her mind to break up with Jake, per the title. Kaufman never met an interpersonal interaction he couldn’t make unbearably uncomfortable, and this may just take the cake: meeting your significant other’s parents is an awkward experience even under the best circumstances, and this story presents the nightmare version of it, as Lucy must meet parents she will never see again for the sake of a person she will soon leave for good. And as if that weren’t tense enough, there’s also the unsettling sensation that all is not as it initially seems. Why is there a new swingset in the yard of an abandoned house the couple pass on the drive? Why does Lucy keep changing what she says her college major is? Why does it sometimes seem like Jake can hear Lucy’s thoughts? Why is Jake so spooked by his parents’ basement? How does any of this connect to the scenes of the aging janitor cleaning a school that cross-cut the scenes of the drive?
In terms of mysteries, this isn’t a procedural or a whodunnit; it’s simply a gigantic question mark for us viewers – what on earth is going on? As such, I’m Thinking of Ending Things fits mostly within the subgenre of puzzlebox mysteries, a kind of story where traditional exposition and context are delivered out-of-order or unconventionally, creating initially perplexing situations that viewers must slowly piece together as the story feeds them more and more of the big picture. This makes the movie an interesting contrast to Kaufman’s earlier movies, which begin with high-concept but clearly articulable premises: a door allows anyone who passes through it to enter the mind of the actor John Malkovich; a screenwriter struggles to adapt the book The Orchid Thief; a playwright uses his Macarthur Grant to recreate the entirety of Manhattan. To the extent that Kaufman’s work has occasionally been called difficult, it’s usually because it can sometimes be a challenge to keep up with the ways that his plots wildly escalate those premises. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is different in that the premise articulated at the movie’s beginning is not actually the movie’s premise. It is a facade, and the mystery is in predicting when the other shoe will drop and viewers can determine what this movie is really about.
The puzzlebox mystery is a versatile subgenre, with room for everything from blockbuster popcorn films like the work of Christopher Nolan to serialized television like Lost to many of the films of David Lynch (whose reputation as an inscrutable surrealist sometimes belies the fact that his work often feels like a puzzle to be solved). On that spectrum running from the gearbox forthrightness of, say, The Prestige to the arthouse opacity of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, I’m Thinking of Ending Things leans more towards Lynch than Nolan. As in a Lynch film, the movie often presents its solvable information not as exposition but as surreal flourishes that give the movie a sense of disquieting otherworldliness and ambiguity. It is, for example, explained pretty quickly what the deal is with Jake’s parents’ dog, which only ever appears on camera as it shakes water from its fur, but the actual experience of watching those shots of the dog shaking its fur, shots which last just a hair longer than they should, is both mundane (like, it’s literally just a dog, and a good dog at that) and also viscerally terrifying in a way that’s hard to articulate in writing. Nevertheless, I imagine all viewers will instantly recognize – either from Lynch’s work or somewhere else that employs the same technique – the dreamlike feeling of some everyday object or experience made suddenly horrifying with a single click toward the uncanny. And by making the puzzle pieces have this aura of a waking nightmare, the expository information feels less revelatory than it does oppressive, because with each detail, you’re sucked deeper and deeper into the headspace of the film’s warped perspective. Even if you technically catch on to what’s going on, it doesn’t feel like you’ve had an insight; it feels like you’re losing your mind.
It’s worth pointing out that the movie’s source material, Iain Reid’s 2016 novel of the same name, ends up feeling much more like the Christopher Nolan approach to a puzzle than the Lynch (and Kaufman) one, presenting a puzzle mystery as a trail of breadcrumbs that leads an audience right up to an explanation. Though it shares the movie’s basic scenario and growing sense of dread and even large portions of the dialogue and voiceover narration, the novel feels distinct from the movie in that there is a particular moment where it lays all its cards on the table and readers are basically given a straightforward answer to everything. But when the movie gets to the point at which the novel begins to tip its hand, Kaufman ducks around the direct explanation that the book walks straightforwardly into.
The novel, with its somewhat literal ending, gives readers a door by which they can exit the circuitous headspace of the novel’s central POV. To give its climactic explanation, the book literally leaves the first-person monologue that has told the book’s central road trip narrative and has first a direct-address first-person narrator and then a third-person perspective give the reader a bird’s eye view of the story. On the other hand, the movie, without the lightbulb “aha!” moment where all the pieces click into place and It All Makes Sense, ends by circling deeper and deeper into the subjectivity of its point of view. And there is very much a point of view in the film.
The following gets into what might be considered a spoiler, so beware, but the movie is oblique enough that it probably still won’t completely give the game away. By the later stages of the film, what’s become clear (editor’s note: in a movie as opaque as this one, “clear” is maybe overstating things a bit) is that almost the entirety of the movie we are watching is taking place inside someone’s head, and what we’ve been watching are the constructed thoughts of a character rather than the play-by-play of a real event. Kaufman has toyed with this before; a not-insignificant portion of the Kaufman-scripted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place within the mind of Jim Carey’s character as he walks through his own memories and thoughts, a “reality” warped by his own subjective hopes and experiences and biases and fears. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is basically a feature-length version of these sequences. It is a movie that consists of almost nothing but subjectivity, and everything that happens happens because it is a thought in the mind of the character whose perspective we are locked into. Characters grow suddenly older or younger as this character remembers different points of time; persistent ice cream jingle earworms personify themselves as animated characters as they float through the character’s mind. Most importantly, one of the people in the car is likely a completely fictional person created by that mind, or at least a wildly fictitious extrapolation of a relationship with someone the person met only briefly decades prior.
The novel has basically the same ultimate device for the story’s pileup of mysteries, but by walking readers outside of the central point of view in order to give them this revelation, readers are offered a freedom from the mind dictating everything else in the story. No such release is given to the viewers of the movie, which is what makes the film so strange and suffocating but is also what ultimately makes it a much richer experience than the book is.
After all, we are all prisoners of our own perceptions; life can never truly become third-person. What the movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things does is force viewers to reckon with that by never allowing them to step outside of the mind in which these events form. Even in the very few moments when the film allows us to see the character whose mind we inhabit, the camera sticks so close to this person that functionally we have left this character’s mind no more than we leave our own minds when we look in a mirror. There is a horror about the very fact that we are stuck with ourselves for as long as we remain alive, a horror Kaufman explored in one way or another in his previous two films: the traveling businessman who fails to experience anything but his own rotten tendencies to hurt others in Anomalisa, the playwright who remakes the entirety of Manhattan on the stage only to be haunted by the ways in which he cannot leave his own work to experience the lives of the rapidly changing people around him.
Kaufman has sometimes been accused of miserablism, and there’s maybe nothing so miserable in his entire career as the person inside whose mind we are locked in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It is a desperately lonely mind belonging to a person who is, by nature of upbringing and geography and class and perhaps mental health, living out the late stages of life in complete isolation, an isolation the movie implies has lasted a very long time, maybe even back to childhood. Within this mind, the road trip that occupies the majority of the film is actually just pure, pathetic wishful thinking, a grasp for human connection by inventing a fantasy of intimacy with someone who has never meaningfully existed within the character’s life.
In a way, this is a frightening scenario, a sort of authorial id run amok. Even though this invented character is just a figment of imagination, there’s something undeniably coercive about willing a person into existence just to have them be in a relationship with you. Reid’s novel clearly sees a horror story in this situation, and the novel’s ending is strikingly violent and scary in a way that reflects this posture. The movie itself doesn’t completely avoid this discomfort either – there’s a lengthy discussion of the problematic Christmas classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” wherein the possibly rape-y implications are thoroughly dissected, and it’s hard not to let that discussion color the rest of the movie, a lot of which is spent with the fictional character asking to be returned home while the other character delays and deflects.
But, typical of Kaufman, the movie also finds a cautious compassion for a person whose mind is lonely enough to conjure long fantasies like this. In a flourish not found in the book, the characters in the movie speak in conversations littered with references and occasionally direct quotations from a number of media sources – too many to count, honestly, but most notably there’s a discussion of David Foster Wallace’s seminal essay “E Unibus Pluram,” a poem a character claims to have written but is actually a recitation of a poem by Eva H. D., and eventually one character quotes about half of an entire Pauline Kael movie review. As all this is happening, the world itself is getting more allusive, too, specifically of the musical Oklahoma!, which the characters hear a song from on the radio early on in their road trip, and from there the musical makes increasingly intrusive appearances in their journey, up to and including a version of the iconic “dream ballet” sequence completely replacing the novel’s original, violent ending.
The pileup of allusions is an additional twist of the knife, and one that reveals a person who isn’t just lonely but who is so lonely and isolated that they cannot even invent a fantasy scenario without filling in gaps from similar stories in mass media. The only way this person can have human companionship (even an imagined companionship) is to have it mediated through obsessively memorized cultural objects.
As ominous and unsettling as the central character is, Kaufman seems to think there is something universal to be found in the allusive facets of this loneliness, or at least universal to those of us who live in the world of modern mass-media, where huge swatches of our subjective conception of the world comes not from direct experience but through the media we have experienced. Think, for example, how common it has been over the past few months of anti-racist uprisings for activists to urge white people to seek out black stories in film, television, and literature as a way of beginning to “understand” the experience of racism, or how easily someone can get on YouTube and find footage of a concert they have never been to in order to vicariously experience it. Or, more broadly, think about how even mundane interactions with friends and family are mediated by the internet and screens.
Kaufman obviously isn’t some luddite writing an anti-media screed against his own industry; this is the same person who used a screenplay to invent for himself a fictitious twin brother with whom to share an Academy Award nomination. It’s a natural and often fruitful human impulse to project ourselves into media and have media projected back into ourselves, and therein lies the fundamental humanity of the film’s POV character. There’s a recognizable piece of this character’s behavior that should scan familiar to anyone who has ever looked to a movie or a book or a television series to help understand something or someone better. But like the dog shaking its fur or the way that Lucy’s college major keeps changing, there’s something off-balance and uncanny about the specific way that the character uses this understanding to populate his world. In casual conversation, people don’t actually just start to talk like Pauline Kael writes; they don’t spontaneously perform dream ballets. The road trip avatar for the POV character is peculiarly petulant at times, aggressively, hectoringly intellectual at others, and the uncomfortable implication is that whatever understanding has been gained from media has been in some way misapplied or warped.
At one point, this same character comments that movies fill people’s heads with lies, and that’s the magic of the whole endeavor of narrative media, isn’t it: the knowing acceptance of artificiality matched with a promise of deeper ecstatic truth. A puzzlebox mystery openly tells its audience half-truths and even outright lies with the promise that dedicated engagement will bring more satisfying answers.
But this puzzle film’s insistence on sidling around explicit answers gives it a claustrophobic insularity that twists this promise into a threat. Stuck within a single brain, without the grounding force of actual human contact, the possibility of media to deliver something externally meaningful becomes unmoored and even destructive. In place of an explanation, there is just an interpretive dance lifted from Oklahoma! More chillingly, at another moment, the POV character, who is in the throws of what seems to be a severe mental breakdown, delivers to a hallucinated cheering crowd the acceptance speech John Nash gives when he receives the Nobel Prize in A Beautiful Mind, a movie with a famously problematic depiction of mental illness. With nobody to say otherwise, this character has internalized the saccharine half-truths about mental illness often peddled by Hollywood mass media without being able to recognize (or maybe just not care) about the imminent physical danger this breakdown presents. The solipsism is pitiable and tragic. In isolation from human contact, there can be only the character and the media, not the reality.
In a depressing twist on the famous sequence in Being John Malkovich in which John Malkovich himself goes through the door to enter his own head, the POV character has essentially done the same, only instead of a lively crowd of people babbling “Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich,” there is only a cold, howling void through which there is no choice but to drive forward.
In one way or another, all of Kaufman’s films are about the desperate, often unhealthy ways in which alienated people grasp for human connection, whether that’s through parasocial relationships with celebrities (Being John Malkovich), the possibly foolhardy optimism of romantic relationships (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), obsessive creation and consumption of game shows (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), or the creation of monumental works of art (Synecdoche, New York). There is a delusion to any of these endeavors, but their respective movies’ conflicts usually arise from the way that these delusions grind against the real people their protagonists encounter.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things may be Kaufman’s bleakest vision yet, as it envisions a point at which this friction has disappeared, a character grasping for human connection when there is none within reach. Protagonist, author, viewer – all subsumed into the same echo-chamber.