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Being only anecdotally aware of Kaufman's other work, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is my first experience with the screenwriter's particular brand of introspection on screen. Based on the 2016 novel by Iain Reid, its bare bones plot is simple and linear in all the ways the rest of the film is not: an unnamed woman (Jessie Buckley - for the sake of clarity, we'll call her Lucy) travels to rural Oklahoma with her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) for the first time. Over the course of long, meandering intellectual conversations in the car, a pair of brilliant, baffling, space-and-time-agnostic performances by Collette and Thewlis, and a generous smattering of dream ballet, we get less exposition than increasingly queasy feeling. Dread and disorientation. Horror, at first, when Jake's controlling behavior intensifies and the rules of Lucy's reality continue to bend. (Is she in danger? Is her name Lucy, or Amy, or Louisa? How old are Jake's parents? What's up with Jimmy the Dog?)

However, once these questions accumulate into something more concrete - a rarity, here - I'm Thinking of Ending Things becomes less about the facts of this physical place and more about its meaning. References from Jake and Lucy's road trip conversations manifest in Jake's childhood bedroom as stacks of books and movies, including a poem Lucy recited earlier as if it were her own work-in-progress. During dinner with Jake's parents (another incredible Tense Family Meal performance by Toni Collette, come on), Lucy's backstory shifts from hobby to hobby, job to job. She's a poet; she's a painter; she's a virologist, a physicist, or a gerontologist, depending on the needs of the conversation, the needs of this particular moment in this volatile stage play. The house is a Moebius strip. The people within it change, age, adapt illogically. Everything feels an amalgamation of everything, and it should: everything is a figment of Jake's imagination.

In Reid's novel, as suggested by Kaufman's adaptation, the world of I'm Thinking of Ending Things exists within the mind of a lonely janitor, the same one seen waxing floors and eating lunch solo at the local high school. The house, Jake's temporally-challenged parents, Jake himself, all constructs of the janitor's design. And Lucy is a fantasy, too, a chimera of Jake's internalized cultural references and desires made three-dimensional. Just as we consume media and absorb it into our own psyches, Lucy quotes all the right authors, paints all the right pieces according to the janitor's life. (She even shifts, rarely and effectively, into embodying other women: the star of a saccharine rom-com, the real-world film critic Pauline Kael). But Lucy's discomfort in this world, our vicarious discomfort as observers, moves beyond simply psychoanalyzing this particular janitor from this particular part of Middle America. What happens when the figments of your imagination become something larger, move beyond your total control? Do they become real - were they real to begin with? How does your mind react to seeing itself?

Lucy fights with Jake. She disagrees with him, is bored by him, finds him lacking (is thinking, you know, of ending things). She has agency enough to question her surroundings and her own nature - what she remembers, who she is, how long she's known Jake - and yet, at the end of the film, remains just another part of the fantasy, fixed in place. It's a refreshing take on the Woman-as-Male-Fantasy trope, and one that feels more honest in its innate contradictions than something overtly concerned with domination. Her relationship with her creator is messy. And when they reunite in the halls of the high school - Lucy and the elderly janitor, no longer Jake-ified - it's an interaction marked by equal turns anger, and panic, and tenderness. Lucy is unraveling within the bounds of Jake's imagination, but she's not supposed to be. She is Jake. She's an unruly thought inadvertently set loose, and when she asks if the janitor has seen Jake, he says, "I haven't seen anyone. I mean, except you. I see you." I don't know how this sentiment feels for someone who gets along with their brain (if anyone truly does). But here, maybe, is Jake's olive branch to himself. To be seen by others is one thing; to be seen by oneself, another. Here, embracing a woman who is both him and not, Jake gets both.

Back at dinner, Lucy describes her style of painting to Jake's parents, saying she "[tries] to imbue [her] work with a sort of interiority." Expressing feeling through landscape. Painting from inside her head. I'm Thinking of Ending Things exists in that liminal mental space between gut-deep feeling and conscious logic, overwhelms with details that may not be as poignant as the greater sensation of seeing and being seen. Thoughts don't need to make sense to have meaning; desires don't need to be simple or coherent to be real. Maybe we don't even have complete ownership over either. It's something ugly and irrational and neurotic that is impossible to pin down, in words or film or otherwise, with any kind of totality- but I'm Thinking of Ending Things crafts space enough to feel it.


Char's Watchlist:

• I'm Thinking of Ending Things (writ/dir. Kaufman, 2020; Netflix)