"I'm thinking of ending things"

 we watched this weird movie

Charlie Kaufman’s Guide to ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’: The Director Explains Its Mysteries

If Kaufman's enigmatic Netflix drama has you scratching your head, fear not: The director has answers.

Eric Kohn

Sep 4, 2020 12:30 pm

 @erickohn

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“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”

[Editor’s note: This article contains major spoilers about the plot of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”]

Charlie Kaufman is not a fan of solving movies for his audience. “I’m not really big on explaining what things are,” the writer-director said in a phone interview. “I let people have their experiences, so I don’t really have expectations about what people are going to think. I really do support anybody’s interpretation.”

Nevertheless, nothing in Kaufman’s head-spinning repertoire has begged for answers more than “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” His scripts for “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” took bizarre labyrinthine paths into the troubled male psyche, a journey he continued with directing efforts “Synecdoche, New York” and “Anomalisa.” In his new Netflix-produced feature, however, Kaufman has built a story steeped in the details of a single troubled mind, and littered it with so many references it practically demands a masterclass in semiotics to parse them all.

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The result is a dense, hypnotic narrative so overloaded with information that no first viewing can absorb it in total. While “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” may baffle or frustrate viewers trying to parse it from moment to moment, it also has a clear-cut sense of purpose: Jake, whose childhood room is loaded with books, DVDs, and other detritus from his youth, has so fully absorbed the media surrounding him that it seems to govern every aspect of his reality. It isn’t necessary to understand every reference to grasp this aspect of the movie, or even appreciate its intent, but these intellectual pathways enrich the nature of the enigma and reward repeat viewings.