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‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ Review: Kaufman’s Brilliant Existential Netflix Drama Defies Every Convention
She’s thinking of ending things. Whatever her name is. Lucy? Louisa? “The Young Woman,” as star Jessie Buckley is listed in the credits? It changes like the weather or the color of her winter coat, brazenly and yet in a way that you don’t really notice until it starts to snow. His name is Jake — it’s always Jake (Jesse Plemons). They’ve only been dating for about seven weeks, though seven weeks can be long enough to crystallize into its own kind of forever. He’s driving her deep into farm country in order to meet his parents, and she’s perverse enough to go along for the ride, even if she can’t shake the feeling that the two of them are about to reach an irreconcilable fork in the road.
WATCHGUIDE: I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Where did that idea come from, and how did it get here? It just seemed to show up one day, as if someone had incepted it into the deepest layer of her mind. But it’s real. It has to be. “You can’t fake a thought,” Jake once told her, and this one is exploding behind her eyes like a fireworks display that only she can see even though it tinges everything she looks at.
“You can’t fake a thought.” Those words appear twice in the opening paragraphs of Iain Reid’s 2016 novel “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” You don’t even have to turn the first page before it’s clear why Charlie Kaufman was so drawn to the book, as the filmmaker’s career has always been shaped by a fascination with the tortured — if tragicomic — relationship between the life of the mind and the world that’s filtered through it. Kaufman is obsessed with the cracked echo chamber of human consciousness; with the feeling that everyone is talking to each other through a two-way mirror; with the perverse irony that our inescapable ego-centrism is the one thing we all have in common.
