To Die, To Sleep - Perchance to Dream: A Review of I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) Dir. Charlie

“Show, don’t tell,” is a rule of good storytelling. What you show and how you show it is the art of good storytelling. The new Netflix hit, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, marks a return for filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, who’s work is defined by their unconventional storytelling methods. His 1999 cult classic ‘Being John Malkovich’ is a good example of this, a better example, and one more parallel to I’m Thinking of Ending Things is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which he wrote. Kaufman presents his stories to us like a fever-dream. They are so steeped in surrealism, juxtapositions, and even delirium that we exert our efforts to decode the film and find out what exactly just happened. I have always been hesitant in trying to decode a film. But, in some cases, we are rewarded for our efforts. 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things introduces us to Lucy. Her inner monologues describe a person who feels stale, apathetic, especially regarding her relationship with Jake. Jake picks up Lucy, and the two head out into the snowfall to have dinner with Jake’s family. The two banter in the car, and we Jake to be intelligent, caring, decent, if a bit petulant. They arrive at Jake’s family barn house. They have an awkward dinner, and we peer inside of Jake’s world, his memories and identity. Moments of dry humor and disturbing revelation flow seamlessly, almost gently, disregarding the disassociating world around them. 

Here, Kaufman also decides that our subject of interest, Lucy, is a faulty narrator. She claims to have written a poem, yet she reads the same poem out of a published book that she did not write. She sees photographs she claims to have taken displayed in the basement, but her records of having taken said photos are gone. What is happening? Who is Lucy? Who is Jake? Who are these parents? These are only the surface level questions viewers will have at this time.

Lucy and Jake set out from the barn house. Lucy has had enough and needs to go home. The snowfall can now be defined as more of a blizzard, a whiteout. Jake drives Lucy and viewers’ anxieties through the roof as he disregards the snowstorm to get ice cream. Although it was Jake’s idea, he is wary of the girls working there and makes Lucy fetch the ice cream. As she does, she is given a cryptic and foreboding warning. 

Disturbed by cups full of ice cream that are “too sweet” for consumption. Jake decides to take a foreboding back road to his high school to ditch the cups. Jake makes a daring move to seduce Lucy in the car and is stricken with a vision that they are being watched. He stomps into the high school to correct the perverted voyeur. Lucy, tired of waiting, follows him. She meets the janitor. She finds Jake, which ushers a literal and symbolic ballet between the two characters. 

The ballet dance tells its own story. A choreographed dance sequence describes the janitor attacking Lucy. Jake defends her as is ultimately killed by the janitor. Our janitor, who we get glimpses of through the movie, finishes up is janitorial duties and gets in his car. He is driven mad by nefarious visions of an ice cream store theme and a maggot invested pig who invited a now naked janitor back into the school. The film closes with Jake reciting a famous speech from A Beautiful Mind, and sings “Lonely Room” on a set made out to look like the musical, Oklahoma.  

These are the story’s anchor points, but they seem more of a side dish to the strobe of disorienting, hallucinatory sequences that this film is filled with. Seasoned with so many abstractions, what actually happens is elusive. But there is a code. The code lies in film and general references to the arts. The film makes several references to this: the banter in the car about Cassavetes A Woman Under the Influence, a discussion of an essay written by David Foster Wallace speaking to the effect media consumption can have on reality. We also see sequences depicting a movie within a movie that our janitor is engrossed in it. All of these references are keys to breaking the code that is I’m Thinking of Ending Things. 

According to the titular novel, our janitor is, in fact, Jake, old and alone. Lucy is merely an imagination, a fantasy he creates and is fueled by theater, movies, novels, etc. Jake/The janitor dies, this is simulated by the animated, maggot-infested pig beckoning him back into the school. In his dying moments, we see the life lived and the life he’d imagined. These two things: one real, one fanciful, perform their own choreographed dance as death inches closer, and Jake/The janitor evaluates. However, this is only a theory based on the assumption that Kaufman’s adaptation of Lian Reid’s novel is accurate. While we can’t know exactly, we are given a lens to digest Kaufman’s film - which is helpful. 

I’m still not entirely sure what happens in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I do not know what characters are real, trustworthy, or the central conflict of the story. I do believe there is a death. Whose Death? Perhaps all the characters’ deaths. Kaufman exceeds, if any filmmaker can, in portraying the blurring disassociating experience of Death. Death does not guarantee closure or resolution. In fact, this lack of a promise on Death’s part creates apparitions from the other side, ghosts. And, in reflecting on ghosts, we see Jake’s mind is fraught with memories that haunt him as much as it haunts the viewer. Some things linger in the basement of his family’s barn house that lingers in the basement of our mind’s which we actively seek to keep restrained in hopes that the Jungian shadow that lives down there might starve to death. 

I also believe mental disturbances are present in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I believe Jake/ the janitor suffers a fragmented mind, delusional in his inability to discern the reality around him and the fantasy he created. I believe that Lucy, in the Jungian sense of archetypes, may also represent feelings of alienated, alone, and apathetic. Jake’s dad suffers alzheimers, his mother, perhaps bipolar disorder. This film’s mental health statements are unclear other than its attempts to portray them through its unsettling sequences. 

I am resolved to believe, concretely, undoubtedly, that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a unique cinematic experience, an experience that challenges our interpretive abilities. One that forces us to question our presumptions of what a film is and should be. You may at points, like I did, pull out of the film if for a moment and find yourself shocked that you are a person, lying in a bed or on a couch watching a movie. That you are real. Are you alone? Are you with company? Are they who they are, or are they what we imagine them to be? Are we who we are, or are we what we imagine ourselves to be?

8/10