What is transpiring is illusory except if the mentality adjusts to the frame rate of Charlie Kaufman, writer-director, in his return to live-action feature since the transcendentalist "Synecdoche, New York" in 2008. "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," released by Netflix, has countless captures more than its runtime can accumulate. It does anyway, an altruistic feat resembling the Young Woman's (Jessie Buckley) as she undergoes a road trip with Jake (Jesse Plemons), her boyfriend of seven weeks, to meet his parents. Lucidly abled in ambiguity, Kaufman names the lady protagonist Young Woman to anchor the psychological grappling of the film (based on Ian Reid's novel of the same title).
A thorn to the bum is its duration. If "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" is somewhat possessing, the process goes so long that the possession seems fabricated. The opening 30 minutes or so are a drive into winter, with the Young Woman and Jake conversing in the car, along wide to medium shots and dedicated close-ups, about William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" and a curiously brand-new swing set fronting an abandoned wreck of a residence to faint dialogues as if gaslighting if there were really conversations slithering out of Jake's winterized, copper-brushed lips. Then again, the drive is a demonstration of how cruising across an icy nowhere can be excruciatingly weird between driver and passenger, let alone lovers. The extended sequence punctuates in Jake's childhood house perched on the graying whiteness of the snowy wilderness — a picture that Kaufman uses to frame the remoteness that the couple has reached with just the snowstorm as lodestar.
"Ending Things" is a meet-the-family movie that becomes more of an awkward situation pillared by the bleak tonality. It begs what the hell is going on as the Young Woman recounts her first encounter with Jake then mentions "ipseity" which she says is a synonym to "selfhood," crumbs of Kaufman's philosophical screenplay. While seeing "Ending Things," the self is somehow separated from the essence of the film inasmuch as the Young Woman disintegrates from her self and the actual oddity of her partner's perplexing household. All her chatter is white noise at the dinner table, tensing to the potential that she might be alone to begin with. Toni Collette as the Mother is consciously and decisively deranged. The Father, portrayed by David Thewlis, have tics that the actor scarily puts realness into that the family's dementia will be remembered even after the blizzard, which is whispering non-stop while the camera mercilessly cuts to reaction shots of each character for examination of their noir psychology and fragmenting reasons, specifically the Young Woman. Buckley is composed as her character devolves against the mangled figments of her logic.
Kaufman records illusions and translates them into cinema, the telescope wherein these images are examined with truthfulness. The writer-director does with "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" what George Méliès achieved in 1902 with "A Trip to the Moon." Although Méliès's revolutionary filmmaking wrote the conventions of fiction movies, "Ending Things" hammers down the conventional and becomes the puppeteer of sanity, if there is still such whilst the staircase sequence where the Young Woman walks down the steps in perpetuity that creepily reminds of the Penrose stairs — scored with the scathing notes by Jay Wadley and Buckley's voice over.
Plemons being Jake has serial killer attributes like he is a geek Hannibal Lecter. This selection of his acting armory has been presented in the "Black Mirror" episode "USS Calister" where he performed as Captain Robert Daly. In "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," his acting is uneasy yet hard to resist because of his kindness that lurks underneath the smothering clutches of snow. Plemons impossibly renders fearlessness and worry in Jake that his dramatization becomes primal. Instinctive even, proof of Kaufman's grasp with the human condition since "Ending Things" is thought-resounding, further wrestling with the frailty of thoughts with the dream ballet sampled from the musical "Oklahoma!" Intoxicating, the film's spirits bubble up until it fades to the blinding white of snowflakes verging from Jake's triumphantly heart-squeezing song number.
From the cold, disillusioning script, the Young Woman and Jake blurts out in unison: "Perspective." Although "Ending Things" tackles the conceptualization of realization. What is perceived must be so.
Director: Charlie Kaufman Image & Trailer ©️ Netflix; YouTube.com
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