![]() ![]() The first hint of weirdness comes early, when she and Jake are driving towards his childhood farm. What’s so confusing and hard-to-decipher about that? Quite a lot, in fact. Jesse Buckley’s character (whose name is switched around many times throughout the course of the film, but is referred to on Wikipedia as “A young woman”)-wait for it-thinks about ending things with her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemmons), but still goes with him on a seemingly normal trip to his parents’ house nevertheless. Seeing how deceptively basic the film’s synopsis is, I can see more than a few of you begging to differ. Admittedly, this can either result in an intricate, unforgettable treasure or a smug, pretentious mess, but for me, I’m Thinking of Ending Things far and away the former. ![]() Though I fully understand why not everyone has walked away intrigued or satisfied with Kaufman’s take on Reid’s much-acclaimed novel of the same name (in fact, it took me two watches to really sort out my feelings about it), this isn’t a film you can just watch once and be done with, but revisit, study, and ponder over-or, at the very least, look at someone else’s interpretation of it-in order to truly appreciate. Released on Netflix while the streaming platform was mired in controversy, his newest film can be fittingly described as atmospheric, haunting, unpredictable, and even challenging… though perhaps the most fitting term for it is “divisive”. Charlie Kaufman has conjured up quite a few bizarre cinematic visions over the years (most notably, 1999’s Being John Malkovich, which ironically stands as the most accessible work I’ve seen from him), but if I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t his strangest film yet, it is certainly his most oblique.
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