I'm Thinking of Ending Things Explained

I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Charlie Kaufman’s latest film for Netflix is about what you would expect - a dense, impenetrable mind-bender liberally splashed with obtuse references, emotional anguish, sudden changes in tone and style and steeped in an illusory dream-like quality. If you have never read the book on which I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based, you would have no idea what is happening in this movie once the credits roll. But never fear, like Apollo fist-pumping the dawn I am here to light the way.

The movie, which is really more like an experimental play if we are being honest, is about a young woman (never really named) being driven to meet her boyfriend Jake’s parents on their rural farm, and then the ride home from the farm which ends at a high school and involves an animated talking/rotting pig and a musical number cribbed from Oklahoma! Before really giving itself over to its more surrealist impulses, the first third of the movie tries to play it like you are watching a somewhat straightforward character drama.

The young woman (Jessie Buckley) spends a lot of time inside her own mind - and we have almost non-stop access to her internal monologue, which bounces around like Mrs Dalloway, mostly turning over the question of whether she should end things and whether she is really compatible with Jake. From the outset they seem pretty awkward together and something is obviously not right with Jake (Jesse Plemons). The woman’s name keeps changing, as does her profession and dinner on the farm quickly becomes untethered from narrative reality as we start experiencing sudden, jarring time shifts.

All of this is intercut with scenes of an aging janitor doing his rounds in and around a local high school, so we are meant to understand there is a connection there but it doesn’t really make itself clear until the end (and even then, clarity is not really the end game). Once the farmhouse scenes make a full turn into dream reality, it’s obvious that what you are seeing is a symbolic representation of an internal mental or emotional state and it’s just a matter of figuring out whose and how it all comes together. The woman eventually finds clues in Jake’s room that suggest she is somehow a mental construct of his, or potentially the other way round.

My guess was that Jake and the woman were part of the same personality, possibly having to do with coming to terms with repressed homosexuality or gender transitioning. There is some discussion of homosexuality which could lend itself to that interpretation. But then who is the janitor and how does he fit into all of this? The connection between Jake and the janitor is pretty clearly hinted at. Finally all is revealed through a random musical number and some animated mumbo-jumbo, but I still had to double check some elements of the novel to make sure I understood.

Here is what happened. Jake is the younger version of the janitor - he has lived his whole life alone in this rural farm town, feeling inadequate and isolated. The woman is based on someone he saw once in a bar but never talked to. She is the fantasy he has constructed of what life could have been like if he had the stones to make a move. To give you an idea of just how anxious and insecure Jake is, even in his fantasy his girlfriend is constantly thinking of ending things with him which is really pretty sad once you grasp the subtly of it.

Of course, the unreality of the character - her lack of a name, her constantly changing profession - gave away that she was probably a mental construct of some kind, either her own or Jake’s. But Kaufman tried to trick us by fixing her as the narrative lens and giving us access to her internal monologue. How can a fever dream have an internal monologue? That was really just a red herring so we wouldn’t figure out that she was Jake’s fantasy of a dream deferred. In the end, Jake - alone, his parents gone, his ambitions unfulfilled - is the janitor in the school and he has a final devastating break with reality and commits suicide, egged on by a mystical cartoon pig who speaks in platitudes about destiny.

You might say this is a weird, difficult film. It has the trappings of a Sam Shepard play, and the dialogue is often very dense and alienating. But it’s also very much a Charlie Kaufman production, obsessed as he is with themes of the internal life of a person in relation to the outside world. This theme makes an appearance in nearly all his work - Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Anomalisa - where he basically asks different versions of the same question: what does it mean to be me? To be a person?

And I have to say I didn’t think the execution was that great in this movie - Anomalisa got a similar point across in what I personally found to be a more interesting way - but I admire any filmmaker who is willing to step outside the box and commit to a weird idea and go for it. So the film is worth seeing, but maybe not more than once which is ironic since you pretty much have to watch it twice to figure out what the heck is even happening.