It has been a while since I had felt completely drawn into a movie’s world, where it was incredibly hard to pull my eyes away from the screen. It is much easier to be drawn in when in an actual movie theater than at home, but in this strange movie, I Am Thinking of Ending Things, it did not matter that I was watching it on the TV in the basement. I could not take my eyes away from the screen. It seemed like every line of dialogue was a clue as to what the movie was trying to convey, and it seemed like there was something hidden visually in every scene that needed to be picked up to catch on to what was happening. The crazy thing is, that even while giving my full attention to the movie, and actively trying to parse every scene, I do not feel like I have a solid grasp on the goal of the movie, but I do have a few ideas.
Before watching Netflix’s newest release, I decided to look at the summary on google to see what the movie was about. I found it very odd that, the summary was only one sentence long, “Full of misgivings, a young woman travels with her new boyfriend to his parents' secluded farm.” From that one sentence, there is not much knowledge to gain. As for the genre, it was labeled as horror/drama. So between these two pieces of info, I expected the family to be in on some kind of murder to try and kill the girlfriend, but this was far from the truth. I would even say that this movie should not even be described as a horror film if anything it was more psychological. Then as far as trying to summarize the movie, the one sentence on Google does a fairly good job. Other than saying that there is a couple that seem odd together going to his parents’ house and then heading home, and on their journey home getting side tracked, there is not much more to say that would not go much more in depth.
The whole movie was encompassed in an uncomfortable feeling that embraces the viewer from the first couple of minutes into it. Lucy gets into the car and the viewer is present for an extremely uncomfortable interaction between her and Jake. While watching it felt like I was intruding upon a conversation that I should not have been listening to, but at the same time, there was something about the dialogue that kept me extremely interested. They switched from topic to topic making many allusions to popular authors, poets, and movies. There were times when it felt like they got along very well, but then it would be contrasted almost immediately by them seeming to be completely different people that did not belong together at all. This made sense due to the title being I Am Thinking of Ending Things. Lucy seemed like a very dark and depressed person. The opening of the movie was her inner dialogue about probably not wanting to be in the relationship anymore. Once at the parents’ house the uncomfortableness increased, there were dead lambs, a story about pigs being eaten alive by maggots, and the mom who waved too much from the upper window, and that was all before they went inside. Once inside the parents seemed to not even be in the house, they waited in the living room for what felt like an eternity before they came down the stairs. Once at the dinner table the way the parents acted was incredibly unsettling, and it felt like Lucy just needed to run. While at dinner, none of them ate anything, and at the end of the meal, Lucy took the food back to the kitchen like it was normal. Also the relationship between the parents and Jake did not feel like they were on good terms, which made it all the odder that he had brought Lucy to meet them after only a little over a month of dating. While at the house it just kept feeling like something bad was going to happen.
So one of the biggest aspects of this movie was its bending of time and lack of reality. The initial car ride there seems relatively normal, except for the placement of a brand new swing set in front of a completely broken down house with the roof caved in that no one could have lived in, and there was also an odd billboard that came into play later, but it seemed very out of place. While in the car, one part caught me off guard, the whole movie has an old feel to it like maybe the 1970s or 80s, but once in the car she receives a phone call on her cell phone which caught me off guard, but I was even more taken aback because she had a brand new iPhone, it just did not seem to fit, like the swing set. This was also accompanied by a conversation where Jake said that time was like a train, but it can be jumped off of, it does not have to be linear, so these three aspects seemed to foreshadow what was about to occur. Once in the house, the parents’ ages and state of mental sanity seemed to wavier depending on what room they were in, and what floor of the house they were in. The couples’ age stayed the same, but it seemed to predict what their relationship might be in the future if they stayed together. There is no awareness by Jake and Lucy that there is anything weird happening, which adds to the confusion. When they leave they end up at an ice cream place that was in an endless black void that did not seem to resemble any place where civilization could be found, and the people working there seemed like they were from a different decade. Also when they told the story about how they met, it changed multiple times, but they were always on the same page. The job that Lucy claimed to have also changed every time it was mentioned, she went from being a writer to a poet, to a scientist to an artist. At one point she shows her artwork, but it is found in their basement signed by Jake as if he did it, and the pictures were no longer on her phone. She finds the poem she said she wrote in a book written by someone else. The whole movie was mind bending in an Inception kind of way.
Another one of the key aspects of the movie that seemed to be mentioned multiple times was the effect our constant exposure to media and content has altered how everyone perceives their own reality. It seemed to be saying that sense everyone has so many of their own experiences with a variety of movies, literature, and life experiences that they will perceive events in their life based off of what content they have been exposed to in life. This seemed to imply that there are no unique creations anymore because there has been so much consumption of media that if someone is to try and create something, it had an influence from somewhere else. So it seems like that was why there were so many allusions to various literary works and films, because the director was trying to show all of the varying influences that people have in their lives that affects how they view topics. It also seemed to me that the director was trying create something new and unique to try and break away from the idea that the formation of a person’s own unique ideas is not quite dead, but to truly get away from the common culture and create something new in this age, one would need to go extremely outside the box like this movie did.
Due to the eccentricity of the movie, every little detail seemed to play a role. The movie was very dialogue heavy, or at least for the first hour and fifty-five minutes, there was an odd ten minutes of just music and dance towards the end that seemed very out of place. In the dialogue as I have mentioned there were many hints and clues as to what was going on in the movie and the ideas that it was trying to convey. An example I have not mentioned yet, was the changing of clothes and small aspects to scene. Every few scenes, although it was all supposedly taking place chronologically, the people’s outfits would change, or new pieces of furniture might appear when they go into a room they had been in before. All of this seemed important to the feel of the movie mainly due to the conversation they had about art at the dinner table. They discussed that even without people in a painting, the person viewing the art should be able to feel something based off of the colors the artist chooses to use, and how the artist decides to paint the objects in the picture. The dad argued that a picture needs the people to know what the artist was feeling. So it seemed important to really view the rooms and the people to try and see what the director felt, which was why it seemed important that depending on the scene the people changed what they were wearing, and parts of the rooms were slightly rearranged.
Another aspect that was addressed in the film was dementia and Alzheimer’s. It was brought up in a conversation in Jake’s childhood bedroom in a conversation between Lucy and the dad. He looked much older and talked about how his memory had started failing him. The whole movie made me feel a similar way. With the back stories of the characters constantly changing, it made me feel like I was the one not remembering correctly. It seemed to comment on how the further away an event happens in a person’s life, the more likely they are to muddle the details and make the situation slightly different than how it actually happened. There is a whole podcast on this idea that Malcom Gladwell did for an episode of Revisionist History. There was a point in the movie where Jake called Lucy, “Ames”, short for Amy, and it was slightly addressed, but it seemed like Lucy even forgot what her name was. The movie made it hard to keep all of the details straight, and it seemed very intentional to show how frail our memories can be, not only in old age, but even in the present, it all relates back to the theme of time, and how it can be perceived in different manners.
Everything about this movie just felt odd, but it was so odd I could not turn away. The movie was very artistically done, from the poetic inner dialogue in Lucy’s head, to the constant allusions of other famous literary ideas. It showed how people come into to every situation with their own baggage, which is not just their life experiences, but the content they have chosen to consume that influences the way they think. The film seems to be saying a large amount, but the point seems to be that everyone may interpret it differently. At points in the movie, scenes seemed to drag out, but even those scenes seemed so interesting and detail oriented that I could not look away. I would classify this as a good movie, but not in the traditional sense. I feel like it will create many strong opinions going both ways from people loving it to absolutely hating it, so I must recommend that everyone watch it so you can see what your take away from the convoluted mess might be, based off of your past experiences. It seemed like the goal of the movie was to create the sense of confusion, frustration, and reflection, and it does all of these, which makes it excellent. The movie put me into a confusion of time of my own. I felt like I could have watched the movie in five hours or that it could have taken thirty minutes. It was truly disorienting. I gave this movie an 85, and sense it came out this year, I added it to my movie rankings for this year, and it has come in at number two behind Palm Springs.
SPOILER: So there was one thing that I did not pick up on, but others did, and that was more explicit in the book. The old man working at the school was the one imagining all of it. I partially had that put together, but I was not certain of it. To me it seemed that he was Jake in the future, but I thought it might more directly point that out in the movie if it was. So in essence if Jake and the janitor were the same person, then movie could be him replaying some of his memories, but jumbling them to a certain extent, or there is the potential that he was not mentally well and imagining it all. If it is the latter, he might not even be an older Jake, and the story was more of a distorted imagining from the character. If the janitor is Jake, and he is not completely mentally well, it would make sense. In the movie, Lucy was the one that typically pointed out when things seemed off like with the playground, or the fact that the dog was missing and weird. Jake would always shoot these ideas down saying either he did not see it, or he quickly changed the topic. It showed that he was trying to keep the inaccuracies out of his hopeful perfect reimagining.
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