I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Some films make more sense once you stop demanding that they behave like conventional narratives. I'm Thinking of Ending Things belongs completely to that group. It can confuse, irritate or even push viewers away, but that is part of its strength: it forces you to look differently and accept that emotional logic may matter more than narrative logic.

Charlie Kaufman builds an experience where identity, memory, desire, regret and loneliness seem to contaminate one another. Time does not feel stable, perception does not either, and conversations acquire a strange density, as though every sentence carried something we do not yet fully understand. This is not a film that wants to be solved once and for all, but inhabited for a while.

That also explains why it can lose so many viewers. Anyone looking for a clear, progressive and closed story may grow tired or feel that everything changes for no reason. Some people will probably not even finish it. The film demands patience, tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to accept that certain images work more like states of mind than pieces of a traditional puzzle.
For me, however, that difficulty eventually became one of its strengths. It reminded me, despite all the obvious differences, of the feeling I had when I first read Naked Lunch: entering a work that seems to refuse ordinary rules and forces you to change your position as a reader or viewer. Not because the two works are the same, but because they can produce a similar mixture of confusion, rejection, fascination and reconstruction.

The moment in which you encounter a work like this also matters enormously. No film is watched in a vacuum. Just as certain books start talking to one another when you read them during the same period, this film is shaped by everything you bring with you: other films, other books, ideas about identity, loneliness, time or the possibility of having lived differently. That is why a second viewing could easily feel like a different film.

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are essential. Both maintain a constant unease without relying on big gestures. She brings intelligence, strangeness and a difficult-to-define sense of displacement; he conveys a mixture of fragility, rigidity and sadness that fits Kaufman's world perfectly. Toni Collette and David Thewlis complete the tone with performances capable of feeling intimate and unsettling almost at once.

The staging contributes greatly to that instability. Spaces appear normal and yet never feel completely safe. Cinematography, sound, silence and the unusual length of conversations create an atmosphere that sometimes approaches psychological horror without truly becoming a horror film. Humour, discomfort, melancholy and absurdity can coexist within the same scene.

What interests me most is that the film does not end when it finishes. It does not provide the immediate satisfaction of understanding every piece, but it leaves questions, associations and sensations that keep working afterwards. That can be infuriating for viewers who need clear answers, but for me it is exactly what makes the film interesting.
There is also something deeply sad underneath it. Beneath all the intellectual architecture lies a reflection on the distance between what we think, what we do and what we eventually become. Kaufman can seem cold or excessively cerebral, but here the emotion comes precisely from that accumulation of possibilities, fears and memories that never fully align.

I do not think everything works perfectly. The running time can feel heavy, some passages are deliberately exhausting and at times the film seems to enjoy its own difficulty a little too much. I completely understand anyone who finds it pretentious or hermetic. But that resistance is part of its identity, and in my case it ultimately paid off.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not a film I would recommend to everyone. It asks a lot and can provoke rejection. But I liked it precisely because it refuses to close itself. It is the kind of work whose meaning also depends on who you are when you watch it and what else you are carrying with you at that moment. Years from now it may feel like a different film. Few things are more interesting than that.