Deeper Endings

Deeper Endings

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Kaufman, 2020) was one of the most thought provoking films I have seen in recent years. The multitude of barely noticeable details and wildly peculiar scenes that leave your mind reeling come together to create an impression that would be difficult to experience with any other film. It focuses on the relationship of Jake (Jesse Plemons) and a young woman whose name is never quite confirmed (Jessie Buckley), and the experiences they have during and after a visit to Jake’s parents’ farmhouse. In short, it’s a film about ending things, but the meaning goes much deeper than the title makes it seem.

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In general, I love films like this one. Just enough "WTF” moments to capture your attention, but not too many to make it a completely incoherent plot. It's a psychological thriller that toys with the mind throughout, but resolves itself in an apt way. The minute details that can be found in every aspect of the film, including in the characters' voices, costumes, surroundings, and even camera movements, make it an experience worth watching multiple times. Most of the movie felt like experiencing a dream, where time doesn’t work quite right and conversations don't make too much sense on the surface. It reminded me a lot of Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019), as well as Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson's film The Endless (2017), which are both films that deal with the complications of unstable relationships and psychologically thrilling elements. 

One particular scene that immediately comes to mind is the dinner scene. I’m not super intimate with Kaufman’s films (I’ve never seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I know the main themes are pretty similar to I’m Thinking of Ending Things), but I can tell that the dialogue in this scene (as well as most of the other key scenes) was odd and distinct to a point that it had to be the director’s personal style showing through. The conversation that Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) have at the table is incredibly nuanced and they both give important foreshadowing to the ending of the film.

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Something interesting I noticed about this film is the massive disparity between the audience score and the critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. The critic score is “certified fresh” with an 82%, while the audience score is “rotten” with 48%. The idea that an audience’s reception to a film can be so much worse compared to the critics’ reception is extremely fascinating to me. It leads one to question who exactly should be critiquing films and deciding what exactly makes a film good or bad. 

 © Netflix

My main guess as to why I’m Thinking of Ending Things has such poor audience ratings coincides directly with my personal qualms with the film. The main issue has to do with the actual content of the film, and those extremely peculiar “WTF” moments I mentioned earlier. For a lot of people, films with such odd surface-level content do not make the same impact as those attuned to watching films and consistently searching for deeper meanings. It takes a fair amount of brainpower to recall every scene or snippet of dialogue and decode its meaning. It took me two viewings to come to a definite conclusion about the film’s meaning, and when I did, it was a pretty neat epiphany.