'i'm thinking of ending things' A Review

i'm thinking of ending things is a psychological thriller/horror/fantasy about a young woman(Jessie Buckley) who's thinking of ending her six week relationship with Jake(Jesse Plemons) as the two go to visit his parents on their isolated farm during a snow storm. This is intercut with vignettes of an old man going to work as a janitor at a high school. Various pieces of art/media are discussed and quoted verbatim as the characters flip erratically through personalities, emotions, and ages.

Buckley and Plemons are two compelling actors but their "characters" come off more as acting excercises than actual humans. Because of the stylized nature of the script from each scene to the next it is unclear if they are meant to be the same people from scene-to-scene or if they are people at all. The same is true of Toni Collette and David Thewlis as Jake's parents. In a way this character-tourettes is impressive from a craft standpoint but is utterly unconnected to any real humanity that it's rendered basically meaningless.

Exquisitely shot in a claustrophobic aspect ratio with some really wonderful production flourishes the film is inexorably held back by it's pedantic pretension and lack of actual narrative. Like much of writer/director Charlie Kaufman's solo work it is bleak and unsettling for(seemingly) the sole intent of being bleak and unsettling in(admittedly) incredibly artistic ways. Ultimately this dream/hallucination/memory/fantasy has no actual substance. It has no actual characters, it has no actual emotion because it is more concerned with the cerebral than the tangible, more concerned with looking interesting than actually being interesting.

A beautifully constructed sad sack of a story barely coherent enough to be called such.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

Don't See It.