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Movie Review: I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Mike Tyrkus

There is a certain cinematic gravitas associated with the name Charlie Kaufman when it appears in the credits either before or after the title of a film. He has, after all, delivered some of the more stunning screenplays of the past couple decades (films like Being John Malkovich [1999], Adaptation [2002], and Anomalisa [2015] are particular highlights). So, it is a bit disappointing then that his latest offering, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which he also directs, is often much less mesmerizing and clever than it seems to think that it actually is.

Despite having what seems like serious second thoughts about the future of their relationship from the onset, a young woman (Jessie Buckley) embarks on a road trip with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to visit his family farm. Along the way and then after, when they stranded at the farm due to inclement weather, she comes to learn far more about the young man than she might possibly ever wanted to have known in the first place.

In a film with very few characters, much like the heroine’s tenuous hold on her relationship with Jake, so do Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) drift in and out of the story eerily moving the plot along in way that can only be described as being distinctly Kaufmanesque. So too do a few disparate storylines that seem to derail, then converge, and then break off from one another completely from time to time.

Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” © 2020 Netflix, Inc.

This keeps the tone of the film very much in line with the filmmaker’s other works and makes for an interesting perspective look on his oeuvre, but it does little to help the plodding way in which this particular tale plays itself out or move in any more pleasing a way forward. Hidden somewhere within the two hour and fourteen-minute running time of this film is a more concise, less verbose, and probably more compelling story.

That being said, Kaufman’s directing here is actually quite good. There is a feel to the world of this film that is intrinsic to the psyche of the participants that is hard to shake when all is said and done. But, again, that is something he might have been able to get across far more economically and poignantly by being a bit more succinct with the storytelling.

Despite the overlong running time, there is still a mesmerizing quality about Kaufman’s style that allows even a film like I’m Thinking of Ending Things to transcend the confines of being a little too self-indulgent at times to be an interesting and provocative exploration of the damaged psyche of an individual trying to ascertain his self-worth in an isolated and melancholic world.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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