![]() Overall, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is dizzying and thoughtful and unique, a wholly original love-horror-treatise on mental illness and anxiety, a perfect vehicle for Kaufman’s directing, yet its oddness is meandering or exhausting, perhaps running in too long at 2 hours and 15 minutes. In the car, in a snowstorm, on a remote farmhouse, in the mind, there is a dense psychological weight to the story, where the gaps between the self we want to be and the self we project onto others dwells in the spaces of our worst traumas and fears, like the basement serving as the literal embodiment of Freud’s notion of ‘Unheimlich’ here. It masterfully echoes the feeling this merry-go-round can evoke, with thoughts of chronic anxiety. The film pointedly talks about mental illness and its effects are passed down through blood lines (the ‘genetic lottery’) as well as the toll it has on family members (or perhaps the cause-and-effect). She serves to remind us of the chasm between our innermost selves and those we love the most, which our physical form cannot encroach upon, no matter how hard we try: all of us just living in the prison of our minds, a theme exposed in a similar film, 2013’s Upstream Color. Our narrator, Jake’s girlfriend offers an internal monologue that is both terrifying and evocative. The film shows the couple in the car espousing contrasting and contradictory views on Cassavetes or science or philosophy, and in erratic manners – our narrator’s occupation seems to suspiciously switch endlessly – only serving to add suspense to the anxiety we have been occupied with since the start. The snowstorm is its own central character, serving as allegory of the ways in which your mind can alienate you, tighten its grasp on you, the darkness and coldness. With their performances, they aptly ape the chaos of a confused mind – multiple personalities, receptive competing contradictory thoughts, not one stable and secure self – leaving us confused, but sympathetic, and anxious to discover more about the roles they play in Jake’s personality, whom thus far has been an enigma, taking a backseat to his girlfriend. Toni Collette gives a performance as unpredictable as her role in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, playing Jake’s suffocating mother, and David Thewlis as the father, is as unsettling as his iconic turn in Mike Leigh’s Naked. Almost immediately I found myself wanting to associate Iain Reid’s suspenseful debut novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, with Russell H. They play a couple whom are only a few months deep into a relationship that all we know of is that our narrator is thinking of ending it, cue: the completely-sensible-idea of venturing in a claustrophobic snowstorm to a remote country cottage to visit Jake’s parents for the first time. Here the horror is in the real, yet is given a supernatural sharp edge editing and jump scares are disjointed and unlike the type we come to expect echoing the disjointed minds of our unnamed narrator (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons). Just like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman uses disorder and repetition to evoke the fear of enmeshment of the self with another, and it works to varying, dizzying degrees. We’ve all had that awkward car journey with someone you’d rather not be stuck with and there are moments where you can see just how irritating being trapped in such close confinement with someone can be.Official poster for I’m Thinking of Ending Things.Ĭharlie Kaufman’s latest psychological drama delves into the mind of Iain Banks from his enigmatic book of the same name, where a maelstrom of internalised anxieties are externalised just as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of a snow storm swirls around its central characters. Sometimes between them and sometimes in the lady’s head, well until her thoughts are interrupted by Jake inexplicably responding to them. ![]() There are huge monologues during the couple’s car journey. The presence of The Janitor is felt throughout the film but his connection to the main story isn’t really clear for the most part. ![]() Look out for her foot! Thewlis conveys some provocative views and doesn’t appear to acknowledge his son at all during the dinner. Collette portrays a spectrum of emotion and reminisces dearly of her son who becomes frustrated by everything she says and does. And those are just the subtle things happening around them.Ĭollette and Thewlis really are fantastic. ![]() From name changes, wardrobe changes and career changes you’re definitely kept on your toes. During the scenes at Jake’s family home there is so much going on that you could easily become distracted from watching while you ponder what’s happening. There’s something so awkward and inappropriate about them as a couple and I found myself mesmerised by them. Jake’s parents are played fabulously by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. David Thewlis as Father, Jessie Buckley as Young Woman, Toni Collette as Mother, Jesse Plemons as Jake in Im Thinking Of Ending Things.
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