“Can I write a guest column on your blog about how much I hated I’m Thinking of Ending Things?”
This was the message I sent to my friend Attilio immediately after finishing Netflix’s latest original film (a message which he graciously agreed to.) I used the word “hate” because that was my first reaction as the credits rolled. But with some distance, I realized “hate” is not the appropriate word to describe my feelings towards this movie. Because I didn’t hate it.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things disappointed me. And in a way, that’s much worse.
The film stars Jesse Plemons as a young man named Jake, who drives his girlfriend of a few weeks out to his family’s farmhouse to meet his parents. And from that premise an elegantly disquieting story unfolds. As the couple draw closer to Jake’s childhood home, the landscape grows increasingly hostile and endless. Not only does the name of his girlfriend keep changing (at first she’s Lucy, then she’s Louisa) but Jake also seems aware, even a little self-conscious, of her inner monologue that fills the awkward, tense silence in their conversation. It all gets under your skin and grows towards a gnawing unease. And there is no relief from this unrelenting tension.
Sadly, there’s also no relief from a pervasive sense of boredom.
The first twenty minutes of the film is an uninterrupted conversation between the two leads as they drive through an unending void of white snow. It’s as unengaging as it sounds, and we’re “treated” to a similarly long slog of dialogue towards the end of Act Two.
To make matters worse, both scenes are stuffed with esoteric references and impenetrable literary allusions that serve no purpose other than to prove how refined a film this is. Oklahoma!, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and the poetry of Eva H.D. all figure into the back and forth, but unless the viewer has a familiarity with each of them they’re left as confused and lost as a book club attendee who didn’t finish the reading. In one scene, the young woman recites a poem for five minutes. In another she puts on a 1920s radio voice and reviews A Woman Under the Influence. They are as embarrassingly self-indulgent as they are dull.
But sometimes you have to eat your veggies, and the hour-long masterpiece that unfolds when the couple (finally) arrives at the farm-house is well worth at least the initial slog to get to it. What happens next is brilliant and unsettling. Jake’s parents talk like records that keeps skipping and act like aliens trying to pass for humans. Subtle details, clothes, hairstyles, the location of a band-aid, change from shot to shot. Dinner is served but no one eats.
It makes you feel like you’re going crazy in a deeply personal way. And for an entire hour I could not turn away. I could not stop asking myself “What is going on here?” And I had to know the answer.
But that answer never comes. Jake and his girlfriend, who by this point has gone by at least four different monikers, climb into their car and drive off into the night. Jake is in no hurry to get to where they need to go and neither, apparently, is the film. They both keep stalling, delaying, extending this journey for another five or ten galling minutes. And like the young woman, the viewer can only hope and beg for answers. Or at least a quick end.
But the answers we receive are so opaque, so layered, so indignantly complex for no reason other than to show off how smart the film believes itself to be, that the endeavor sapped me of all interest in this film. For the first hour I was on the edge of my seat begging for an explanation. By the end, I’m Thinking of Ending Things was so alienating I couldn’t have cared less.
There’s an adage when it comes to writing compelling characters that the eight worst words any reader could say are “I don’t care what happens to these people.” This film managed to top that with eight even deadlier ones. My refrain for the final forty-five minutes was “I don’t care what happens in this movie.”
Watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not easy. It asks for your undivided attention. It requires a critical understanding of over twenty pieces of art, film, and poetry. It demands the viewer let down their defenses and allow it to crawl inside your head.
And how does it reward the obedient viewer for these sacrifices? With an esoteric ballet in a high school, a whole plot reference to A Beautiful Mind, and a musical number from Oklahoma.
I didn’t get it.
And perhaps, because of that, you will dismiss this review. You’ll say, “Oh, he’s just bitter because he didn’t understand this movie.” And that would be fair.
But that’s also not my point.
We can argue about whether films should be accessible all day long, but a simple Google search could provide me the answers that I’m Thinking of Ending Things refused to give. But after this two-hour slog, I simply couldn’t bother to do that much. An hour previously, I was wondering aloud “What is going on here?” But by the end I just didn’t care. The film refused to return my considerable investment. There was no payoff, only more questions and boredom that grew like kudzu. It gave no answers or explanations, and instead expected me to figure it out on my own.
Like a Nigerian email prince promising a huge windfall if you could please just wire a bit more money, I’m Thinking of Ending Things took two hours of my life and promised that, with just a little more time, a little more reflection, just a perfunctory fifteen-minute search on the internet, its profound and life-changing manifesto on the human experience could be mine to understand.
But two hours was already more than it deserved.
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