Fans know what to expect from a Charlie Kaufman film: a tactile exploration of the mind, a surreal bending of time and space, a protagonist who manages to be both quixotic and disenchanted. His latest, Netflix’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (based on the novel by Iain Reid) is the Oscar winner’s first official “thriller” — one free of blood or beasts. The result is an atypical, effectively creepy tale that, like any good thriller, taps into the fears of its audience. The film centers on a young woman (Jessie Buckley) — whose name and backstory changes throughout the film, and her sweet, but nervous boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). We follow the two on a wintry road trip to Jake’s childhood home to visit his parents — a simple premise with a bizarre execution. Much has been said already about the film’s more curious elements: the musical ending, the intercut shots of a solitary high school janitor, an affable talking pig carcass voiced by Oliver Platt; this essay is not an attempt to decode the enigmatic film. Rather, this is a look at how Kaufman’s unique take on the thriller plays with the genre to accurately reflect the horrors of these times.
The film’s setting could best be described as post-apocalyptic. A snowstorm leaves the landscape buried, lifeless. Abandoned buildings littering the endless dark evoke the end of the world — at least as depicted on TV, in the pages of sci-fi novels, or in movies set in a plague-ravaged, dystopian future. Lucy — a version of her, anyway, a budding virologist studying rabies infections — plays the role of the requisite expert who explains the science behind the imminent threat to humanity. “Everything wants to live, Jake,” she tells her boyfriend. “Viruses are just one more example of everything.” The infectious threat in I’m Thinking of Ending Things may not be biological, but it’s “viral,” nonetheless. The film concerns itself with contagious ideas, and our futile attempts to stave off contagion. As Lucy explains, like viruses, “even crappy movie ideas want to live…They grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That’s what makes them dangerous.” In that regard, I’m Thinking of Ending Things takes place in the wake of a type of plague, leaving its characters — and its audience — traversing the ruins of a devastated world.
What we find on this journey is a world rife with zombies. While not the slobbering monsters of Kirkman or Romero, the infected here have been taken over all the same, their bodies vessels for the virus, mere vehicles for consumption. We see evidence of infection at various points, like when Lucia and Jake belt out, from memory, an old radio jingle for a local ice cream shop, the commercial as palpable as a shared childhood experience. The virus infects the couple’s ever-changing courtship story, a rotating variation on the classic rom-com narrative:
Boy meets Girl.
Girl hates Boy.
Boy wears Girl down with tenacity and charm.
Girl loves Boy, I guess.
The End.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
This relationship between Jake and Lucy can only exist through this familiar cinematic filter; the fantasy has fully taken over.
The virus also gives us one of the film’s most winning moments. While debating the merits of 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, Louisa — now a film student — lights up a cigarette and drops into an impression of (or possession by) the late Pauline Kael, delivering a verbatim recitation of the film critic’s infamous review for The New Yorker. It’s a moment that causes mild dissension between the pair (she finds the Cassavetes work shallow, “planned but not thought out,” while he feels “a kinship” with the film’s damaged, erratic female lead), as they supplant their own thoughts and feelings about one another for their respective reactions to the film. They are, at that moment, so consumed by content, that they lose themselves entirely — literally, in her case.
The film acknowledges this penchant for plagiarized memory and how involuntary and unavoidable it can be. “Most people are other people,” Lucia muses, “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion. Their lives, mimicking; their passions, a quotation.” As I copy down that line in preparation for this essay, Lucia interjects: “That’s an Oscar Wilde quote.” At that point, I’m struck by the possible number of other poignant lines from the film I should attribute to voices other than the characters’ — that is, other than Kaufman’s. To wit, mid-film, we enter Jake’s childhood bedroom to discover a library of books and movies — the source for many of the film’s exchanges thus far (including a copy of For Keeps, an anthology of essays by Pauline Kael.) This implies that to fully appreciate I’m Thinking of Ending Things is to also indulge in the tangential works referenced by the film. But until we do, how can we confidently discern where a given reference begins or ends? But of course, isn’t that the point? Then I consider the extent to which movie quotes, sitcom clips, and fast food ads account for my own memories, supplying the lens through which I’ve experienced the world (To this day, I can’t hear Beethoven’s “Für Elise” without flashing back to a mid-80s McDonald’s spot that ran when I was a kid)? Where do I draw the line between my original thoughts and the amalgam of pop culture references I’ve collected over the years? Have I, too, been infected, even as I write these words? As a good thriller should, I’m Thinking of Ending Things convinces the viewer that the threat is real and that it’s all around them – in the air, in the house, in the dark, waiting. Anybody could be the next victim; it might even be too late.
Among the finds in Jake’s stash is the book Hard Rotten Mouth, a poetry collection from Canadian writer, Eva HD — opened to a poem entitled, “Bonedog.” As Lucy reads, she appears struck by her recognition of the piece. By now, the audience has heard the poem, too, recited earlier by Lucy herself — passed off as an original work of her own. It’s a lovely, haunting piece, particularly delivered in actress Jessie Buckley’s fetching Irish lilt as she stares contemplatively out the car window, melancholy, the landscape ashen white. “Coming home is terrible / whether the dogs lick your face or not, / whether you have a wife / or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you / Coming home is terribly lonely.” This is our preview of Jake’s childhood home — a cold, creaky farmhouse, all but empty, battered by the winter, the prime setting for a ghost story. “You are back,” the poem continues, “the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. / Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body.” When we finally arrive at his house, and we meet Jake’s peculiar parents, we’re faced with larger concerns than the spectral plane. Indeed, it’s when we “come home” that we face the real threat posed by the film.
Our visit with Jake’s folks is unsettling for several reasons. There’s a palpable tension between family members; Jake remains mostly silent, leaving Lucia to take the brunt of his parents’ awkwardness; Mom (Toni Collette) sadly cackling through dinner, and Dad (David Thewlis) close-talking and aggressively obtuse, strike the balance of endearing and embarrassing — that quality that inexplicably makes your folks seem cool to every other kid but you. We’re also thrown off by the parents’ fluctuating ages throughout the night — she, at once, an anxious new mother, the next moment, elderly, invalid, and mute; he, ever-greying and increasingly dependent on Jake as the visit wears on. What we’re witnessing is the deterioration of Jake’s parents, albeit in scattered order. Mom’s gradual hearing loss devolves into ghostly whispers and portends a more serious malady, likely dementia. Dad must deal with his own memory failure, relying on homemade labels, “looking forward,” he jokes, “to when it gets really bad and I don’t have to remember that I can’t remember.” It’s an overall tender, sensitive rumination on aging. We come to understand why Jake, haunted by his parents’ painful decline, would choose, instead, to binge on content — memorizing poems, monologues, and jingles in an effort to exorcise ghosts. But as his parents oscillate from young to old, back again, and in between, Jake is assured that he can never escape the cycle of aging, the memory of what it’s done to his family, or, perhaps most lingering, the void that it ultimately leaves. “I miss her terribly,” his dad eulogies, while his wife (“or a wife-shaped loneliness”), sits across from him on the couch, lost to the whispers.
Loneliness, after all, is the real threat. Ubiquitous, it looms large over this otherwise intimate story. The irony is what makes it so frightening: even in the company of others — friends, family, lovers — we could still feel isolated, no matter our attempts to connect. As the title suggests, someone here, ostensibly Louisa, is on the verge of “ending things.” Jake, appearing to read her mind, is quick to interrupt this train of thought (Though, as she admits, “Once this thought arrives, it stays, it sticks, it lingers, it dominates.”). If only Jake can distract her — distract himself — long enough with trivia and debates and deep dives, he can deflect the inevitability of his loneliness. The world that he imagines, this entire persona that he’s constructed from pieces of pop culture, may feel real, and he may feel connected, but it proves to be nothing more than a projection and a constant reminder of the very loneliness he seeks to escape.
But of course, there is no escape.
This is what makes I’m Thinking of Ending Things a fitting — and oddly rewatchable — thriller for our present moment. Not only because we, too, find ourselves at the mercy of a deadly virus, and not just because current events would have us believe that the end is nigh. But because quarantine has shone a spotlight on a sense of loneliness that we felt long before, and have tirelessly tried to avoid. Online — from the solitude of our rooms — we project idealized images of ourselves and the lives we lead, curate identities based on trends and brand affiliations, fed by the cued approval of others, and often used to exploit, gaslight, or simply “own” one another (in every sense of the word). At best, we create a brief sense of community, a fleeting hope. But even then, we still must contend with the reality behind our projection. “Everything has to die,” Lucy tells us, “It’s a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better, born perhaps of the unique human understanding that things will not.” For us, this feeling only mounts the longer this crisis lasts. And as Jake and Ames barrel down a precarious, snowy road, surrounded by darkness with literally no end in sight — she pleading for her release, he bemoaning “the lie of it all” — we can only share in the anger and fear, and the creeping suspicion that we’re in this alone.
