Je veux juste en finir

The cinematography is stunning: every frame feels carefully composed, the shifting color palettes and claustrophobic camera angles create an unsettling atmosphere, and the performances are just as powerful, with Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons delivering subtle, tense acting while Toni Collette and David Thewlis move between absurd and disturbing with ease.

Still, the film can be frustrating. It clearly wants to be very deep, but sometimes that effort shows too much. The philosophical and psychological layers are so heavily packed with references, long monologues, and surreal touches that the core message gets buried. The story about loneliness and regret is meaningful, but the movie demands a lot of patience and background knowledge from the audience. On a first viewing, it's especially hard to connect emotionally with Jake.

The ideas and messages are placed so deep that they start to wear the viewer out, making the film feel harder to follow than it needs to be. It aims for something profound, but in trying so hard it occasionally slips into obscurity, which makes connecting with Jake even more difficult.

Charlie Kaufman channels David Lynch in this eerie, creepy relationship drama that really knows how to get under your skin.

Jessie Buckley, who gave an award-worthy performance in "Wild Rose" last year, does so again here, as a woman meeting her boyfriend's parents for the first time. Much of the film takes place in his car, as they travel to and from his childhood home in an Oklahoma blizzard. These scenes give Buckley and Jessie Plemmons, also giving a terrific performance as her boyfriend, long exchanges of dialogue that tease out the dynamic of this particular relationship, and the dynamic between men and women in general, and a dissection of the film "A Woman Under the Influence" (Buckley recites Pauline Kael's review of the film in character as Gena Rowlands), and includes a stop at an isolated ice cream stand, the film's most Lynchian moment, where a girl with a rash gives Buckley a vague warning. Much of the rest of the film takes place in Plemmons' parents house, where David Thewlis and Toni Collette play versions of Plemmons' mom and dad at all ages, from perky housewife to doddering dementia to dying in a hospital bed, and host perhaps one of the most awkward dinners ever to appear in a film. Then there are the scenes set in Plemmons' old high school, where a janitor (Plemmons as an old man?) roams the halls and doubles of Buckley and Plemmons reenact the ballet scene from "Oklahoma!" in the school corridors.

What is "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" about? If that's the first question you ask before deciding whether or not to watch a movie, you won't like this one. I imagine different people will think it's about different things. Certainly it's about getting old. It's also about getting old without the comfort of believing that life has any purpose, or that there's anything waiting for us in the great beyond. It's about women and their relationships with men. It's about Jessie Buckley's character. Until it's not and it's instead about Jessie Plemmons' character, who gets the final scene of the film all to himself, a rendition of the song "Lonely Room" (again from "Oklahoma!") during which he comes to the conclusion that the fantasies on which we build our lives don't exist and we have to take whatever we can to most closely approximate them. It's a claustrophobic and deeply unsettling film, as much because of its aesthetics as because of its enigmatic mysteries.

Is it a good film? I think it's very good, but I will admit that it didn't linger in my head as much as I thought it would while I was watching it. It kind of made my skin crawl in the moment, but it left me feeling like I was going to get all there was to get from it on a first viewing, and it didn't leave me wanting to watch it again to untangle its riddles.

Grade: A

Sure - after reading the helpful review on imdb that explains the plot, some of the film makes sense. And if you have read the book, Kaufman's surreal approach may be somewhat interesting. If you haven't, this is just a fevre dream that goes nowhere, and is clearly trying very hard to be intentionally incomprehensible. The acting is very good, but that's where the positives end.

Important note: this is not like watching David Lynch at his most weird, where the paranoia is genuine and tongue-in-cheek and the search for meaning a lost cause, but more like a deliberate attempt to confuse the viewer, by withholding information and concealing (WHY) a story that is actually there. And that just feels like vain self-indulgence

The hardest part about watching this movie was trying to figure out why I was watching it. At the end, I had to look up interpretations, which I think took a lot of the magic and reflection out of what a movie should be. I wish it would've been a little less abstract, for those of us who watched it independently from the book, and aren't abstract minded enough to pull meaning out of thin air.

Other than not knowing what the hell was happening, the acting was phenomenal, and so was the dialogue. Now off to the library to try to get something useful out of this story.

The story gets increasingly more bizarre. There are no explanations or closures either. I honestly don't know what I watched.