This Netflix film may be the oddest movie to see this week.
JESSIE BUCKLEY AND JESSE PLEMONS STAR IN “I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS.”
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” streaming on Netflix starting Sept. 4, begins normally enough.
As the film opens, Jessie Buckley (“Wild Rose,” “Chernobyl”) plays a young woman on a date with Jake (Jesse Plemons), a guy she has been seeing for a few weeks. But, as her interior monologue informs us, she wants out. Or at least she thinks she does. Jake is nice and all, but he’s not really right. Or is he? She is, after all, on her way with him to meet his parents. That’s got to mean something, right?
But her discomfort with their relationship soon spills out into the audience. As Jake drives her through a snowstorm to get to the farm where his parents live, their conversations — touching on everything from physics to movies to poetry to Broadway (Jake has a special place in his heart for “Oklahoma!”) — feel oddly scripted, as if they’re parroting grad-school assertions that they think are what two intellectual people would say to each other in similar circumstances. There’s a palpable artificiality. Are they living their lives or those of others?
Of course, seeing as the trippy and fascinatingly dreamlike “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is the work of director/writer Charlie
Kaufman — the screenwriter for “Being John Malkovich” “Anomalisa” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — the feeling that things aren’t quite what they seem is certainly justified. And things get even weirder when we get to the farm and meet the parents, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Not to mention the very, very strange dog.
There’s a tension that snakes through “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” that hints that a horror movie may be in the offing. There is a faint whiff of Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” and not just because Collette is in both films.
But Kaufman is not interested in cheap-thrill scares, those that evaporate once the credits roll. Instead, Kaufman — working from a script based on the novel by Ian Reid — is more entranced by the more existential horror of time itself, and what it does to human bodies, minds, dreams and aspirations.
Speaking of time, “Ending Things” runs 134 minutes, perhaps leading some less-patient viewers to wish that Kaufman had followed the suggestion offered in the title. But the interplay between Buckley and Plemons is engrossing to watch — and these two actors can make it work. While “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is deliberate in its pacing, Buckley and Plemons are compelling, even when everything around them becomes increasingly discomfiting. Even if you have no idea what’s going on, you can always hang on to that.
And then there’s the ending, one which may prompt as much confusion and conversation as the conclusion of “2001: A Space Odyssey” did a half-century ago. (Fans of Texan Shane Carruth’s cult films “Primer” and “Upstream Color” may appreciate the movie’s twisty intellectualism more than most.)
If nothing else, even the film’s detractors will have to admit that none of it is predictable. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a very strange and singular work that seems just about right for a very strange and singular year.