I’m Thinking of Ending Things film review
I have very mixed emotions about this film. It’s undeniably clever at times, but the mass majority of the picture just feels like a mess of ideas thrown together in hope for the best. This starts as a solid seven out of ten, with clear tension and potential, and then it just massively collapsed into awful territory halfway through the second act.
The further you go into this picture, the more irrationally awful it becomes, up until the point it reaches a twist so incredibly derivative that it tarnishes the originality of this piece and arguably Kaufman’s entire work. The acting, production design and manufactured atmosphere were great, but the platitudinous conclusion leaves such a bad taste and ruins the entire film. Not to mention the completely unnecessary digs — or whatever you’d class them as? — at Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard, unnecessary and in poor taste. Ironically, the twist and entire film is such uninspired filth, Kaufman is in no position to take digs at anyone
I have no doubt that in real life Toni Collette is a wonderful, warm person but Jesus Christ she has the ability to make anything as rudimental as waving, creepy. The Netflix x A24 algorithm has now spread so widely that it is just a thin layer of mush, as it manages to digitally render Toni Collette’s Hereditary performance into every movie. There’s a scene that features the main couple, Lucy and Jake, entering a barn. As they do so the simple thought of “okay, now the girls going to say something suggesting how sad the sheep must be to live there” goes through my mind, a few seconds passed, we enter the scene, she walks around, oh look, sheep, the human condition, the vanity of existence, the world is hell, and so on and so on. Films of this kind aren’t supposed to be blatantly predictable.
I really wanted to like this, I’ve occasionally likes Kaufman’s approach to film making before, and I thought from the outside it looked good. However, he spends the entirety of the film briefly presenting new philosophical ideas through its irritating dialogue, yet never expands on any of them.
The scripts talks about existentialism and time, then about female liberation and feminism, then about unreciprocated love/relationships, then about death and aging, then about how desires and fantasies of the impossible can affect you. Minute by minute he skips between topics, each on their own capable of making quality dialogue, even quality plots. Together they make a mess.
I am well aware that Charlie Kaufman often tends to try juggling a lot of different ideas, with plenty of subtext and metaphors, but this film doesn’t even feel like he tried to make something meaningful from it. Every even slightly interesting moment and feature, is put on the back burners for what I can only imagine was supposed to be an unbelievable mindfuck-moment. In doing so, ditches the ideas that kept me watching, each time after giving some meaningless monologue voiceover about it.
Like Kaufman’s prior films I’m Thinking of Ending Things is his tribute, to the depth of the kind of feelings that people can’t express. As a writer / director, he possesses dampened quality. His scenes and monologues are often unshaped and so aimless, that the meanings often forget to emerge. Details that are meant to establish the pathological nature of Jack and his surrounding isolation, become limp, false moments. It is far too regular an occurrence, that the viewer often can’t tell whether a character is meant to be aware of what they are doing or not.
It could be argued that the fact Charlie Kaufman made this film for Netflix, was both a blessing and a curse. On the side of the blessing, he got to direct the sort of creepy, and peculiar, almost off putting style of film that most major studios make a habit of avoiding. And yet, even without a global pandemic the mass majority of people who would see this film, would see it on a TV, laptop, or phone — a less than optimal method for a film experience clearly written and created for the purposes of cinema’s. Thanks to the pandemic, not a soul will see this film in theatres. At home, people have the option to when they are faced by nauseating dialogue, simply turn the film off. A blessing in my opinion, for anyone watching this film.
2.5* 5.5/10
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