I'm Thinking Of Ending Things (2020)
Genre: Thriller/ Horror Time: 2h 14mins Director: Charlie Kaufman
Quick Summary: A young woman soon finds herself with misgivings after traveling with her new boyfriend to his parents' secluded farm.
Warning, this film requires a lot of attention and thinking.
A young woman (Jessie Buckley) sits in the passenger seat of a car as her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) drives them both to his parent's house for dinner. They’ve been dating for seven weeks, just long enough for her to think that it might be time to break up. As her thoughts are communicated to the audience via voiceover, however, Jake breaks in. He does this for a lot of the film and it is so fascinating to watch. You can never really tell if he's just very good at reading her emotions, or that he can hear her thoughts.
The whole journey, the air is uncomfortable between the two. The audience watches as it flicks through the pair having dull small talk conversations, The young woman inner monologuing through her thoughts, and then Jake interrupting when her thoughts start to get heavy. Then when you thought all that was a bit strange, they arrive at his parent's house and things seem a bit odd. The family dog intermittently disappears and never stops shaking itself; Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) are young one moment and old the next; some of Jake’s baby pictures seem to be of his girlfriend instead.
There is a very strong sense of foreboding, right from the beginning, of something dark lurking just around the corner that seizes hold of your imagination and doesn’t let up for the whole two hours, fourteen minutes runtime. It won’t help your nerves that the very fabric of the world holding the narrator in its grasp becomes so utterly untrustworthy and deceptive as to have you questioning every character, every motivation, and every action unfolding in front of you. This film is really an experience in itself, and It's really hard to explain it. This film brings out so many themes and ideas, each person who watches this may come out with a different conclusion or ideals.
I can't really talk about the plot too much as it will spoil it. It's something you just have to sit back and watch unfold before your eyes. My god it does it so wonderfully too. It knows exactly when to speed up the pace and then slow it right back down. This is a chilling and completely surreal exploration of the chaos of the human psyche. This film takes ambiguousness and metaphoric filmmaking to a whole other level. Not only everything the viewer is seeing has, in some shape or form, a philosophical meaning, but the dialogues between the main characters are themselves about cultural, intellectual, and sophisticated matters.
What I can tell you is that the casting is utterly wonderful. The film is worth watching for David Thewlis (Father) and Toni Collette (Mother) alone. Yet, Jessie Buckley (The Young Woman) and Jesse Plemons (Jake) are where the focus really is (and rightly so). Each carries the weight of extremely complex and layered performances that perfectly complement, yet at the same time heighten and intensify, each other’s roles. As always with any Kaufman offering, the impression of it will stay with you long after the credits have finished. I’m not going to lie, I found this movie so intricate that I had a really hard time figuring it all out. As soon as it ended, I knew I didn’t understand it in full, which generated an unusual yet refreshing feeling inside me.
- "Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought."
- "It's Good To Remind Yourself The World Is Larger Than The Inside Of Your Own Head."
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