![]() Kaufman, like us all, contains multitudes. Rating: R (LanguageSome Sexual References) Genre: Mystery & thriller, Horror Original Language: English Director: Charlie Kaufman Producer: Stefanie. It’s a desperate grasping best experienced, in confusion and clarity, with others. Kaufman’s greatest gift, I think, is to open up to others an inner honesty that doesn’t often find its way on screen. My only wish, more than any movie that’s been released straight to the home these last few months, is to have watched “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” with an audience. Adapted from the popular novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a complex chiller with a heart of darkness. And the fleeting presence of Guy Boyd, as an elderly janitor and possible linchpin to the whole movie, is hauntingly good. Reviews I’m Thinking of Ending Things Review: Charlie Kaufman Does Existential Horror. Buckley is extraordinary, whether she’s real or not. It’s a falling that seems to lead further from epiphany, not closer to it, until you’re faced with, of all things, a staged performance of “Oklahoma.”īut to me, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” nearly sustains something beautiful and sad that blends consciousness and time. Certainly some will be less enamored with an experience that can feel like tumbling through a succession of trap doors. ![]() I have my theories about how this all pieces together, but I’m not convinced they matter. There’s a dance sequence down high-school halls, a staged musical and some profound lines of dialogue: “We’re stationary. ![]() Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” spirals more mysteriously into the mind. It, too, was slippery with perspective and reality, but it coalesced more distinctly as from Jake’s point-of-view and around an incident from the past. Kaufman, who famously turned his futile attempts to adapt Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” into “Adaptation,” is this time working from a novel by Canadian author Iain Reid. A picture on the wall of Jake as a child, she notices, looks just like her. Even Lucy’s name and profession shifts seemingly haphazardly. Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis, both surrealistically sensational) are present one moment, absent another. When they arrive at the house, the disorientation only increases. A maudlin mock Robert Zemeckis film makes a satirical cameo. If this is a dream world, movies have their own reckoning for their role in invading and warping our fantasies. ![]() Is this a dream? If it is, whose dream is it? Jake or Lucy’s? Someone, maybe everyone in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a projection. There’s the sense that the conversation - halting, overlapping, full of corrections and backtracks - is as much about the awkward back-and-forth as it is what they’re talking about. “Viruses are just one more example of everything,” says Lucy. Reids preternaturally creepy debut unfolds. In the car, with a mythical snowy nighttime blur around them, they talk Wordsworth she recites a dark poem about homecoming by discussing movies, viruses come up. A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novels unnamed narrator. Pondering whether it’s just easier to keep going, she could be talking about breaking up or suicide. Our perspective is Lucy’s, and she’s thinking the relationship has already run its course. During a blizzard, Lucy and her boyfriend of seven weeks Jake (Jesse Plemons) are driving to the farmhouse he grew up in to meet his parents. Buckle up for this one and make sure you’ve stocked up on your meds.It begins on the road. ![]() But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares. This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. But the authenticity of Buckley’s performance, which seems all the more remarkable when you think back over it than it does when you are watching her, gives the character a solidity, while the other characters drift around her like ghosts. I will say this, it’s good very very good and interesting indeed- along with some very obscure pieces and clues throughout the story, the uneasiness builds into truly terrifying psychological horror as the characters become increasingly visible. Perhaps describing her as the central role is misleading – there’s a friable, mercurial quality to the character that seems to repeatedly crumble and re-form, like a sand sculpture. She is introduced as Lucy, but slips into other names (and other clothes and other voices) as the film weaves onwards. But she’s fully miraculous in the central role of a young woman who has agreed to meet her boyfriend’s parents (a frazzled Toni Collette and David Thewlis) on their isolated farm, even as the snow begins to fall and the angst sets in and she is “thinking of ending things”. We already knew that Jessie Buckley is something special. This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things ![]()
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