I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Review

9.0/10

A Charlie Kaufman film so you know it’s going to be out there. An old guy imagines himself as a young man with a girlfriend who then wants to break up with him. How sad is that? It takes the inner struggle of a singular person and externalises it into a relationship struggle in a way that can hold a thousand meanings. A melancholy film full of loneliness and awkwardness, made hypnotic through the rhythm of windscreen wipers. 

A confronting, dreamlike film. It is really uncomfortable in a very nuanced way. In the interaction between the two “lovers”, there’s always a slight misalignment in their talk and emotions. For me, that created a tension that drew me in. At other times, awkwardness is exaggerated, making it painfully recognizable from real life, hard like statements. A particular dinner scene is really fantastic and reminded me of Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) if you’re familiar with it.

All hidden fears in people are made visible here. The more you desire social masks of decency, the deeper the film hits. In the end, the discomfort is not the fault of the people acting strange in the story. They have every person’s quirks. It is in the disposition of the visitor of the story that other people’s quirks become oppressive. In the disposition of the girl, the guy, or us, the viewers.

The unending nightmarish world comes, I suppose, from the mentality of the characters, of the girl but eventually of the guy who imagines all of it, so the deepest cause of all this lack of life and wholesomeness bounces back and forth between the characters. It may be a projection of the guy, perhaps some kind of commitment fear tied to his own feelings of inadequacy. 

If you haven’t seen the film yet then I’m just rambling. But the emotional ebbs and flows in the behavior of the characters have a recognisable logic to them. From the perspective of the woman, most can be explained by the feeling of getting sucked into someone’s life, including the bones in the closet, while you don’t feel like committing to it. A claustrophobic feeling of seeing the rest of your life boxed in by those bones. Playing roles for the sake of other people’s issues. For the guy, it is the inadequacy underlying those issues and in extension the family he grew up in.

The film somehow combines the emotions of Synecdoche, New York (2008) with the visual energy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and is a good successor to them. Basically, people’s fears are here told via visual metaphors and if you can keep up with a constant stream of needing to interpret those visuals, then it is a really fascinating, tense film. Just keep noticing the emotions involved. Play the role of psychiatrist to decode the film.

When the man and woman are alone, their dialogue, the constant back and forth, should also not be taken literally, as a literal conversation. It’s like they constantly make an effort to revitalize something that keeps crashing every minute. In any case, whatever you see or hear in the film is a completely subjective experience caused by the character(s) themselves. Now I’m rambling again.

I just fear that people who see this won’t pick up all the interpretations. One example is when the couple go to get ice cream and this one waitress who helps them has rash all over her arms and in a scene before she was described as one of those students who will walk with a dark cloud over her head for the rest of her life. And when the guy hands over the cash, he suddenly has the same rash on his hand, but when the girl talks to him about it afterwards, he says he didn’t notice rash on anyone. Because he is the same kind of person. He cannot see it, but his girlfriend is not. She is the visitor in his life with an outside perspective. The scene goes by in a blink and the film is full of that material.

This is the first film in 2 years that I feel compelled to write an entire story about. It happened automatically. I set out to write three lines about it and this is what happened. I don’t understand how one makes a film like this. It’s brilliant. Many people hate it.

Don’t forget to enjoy the love in the final dance. Take a breath to remove the tension.