I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) - No Way!

 

★★☆☆☆

I kept wondering, what the hell is going on here, and thought of quitting it from time to time while watching 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things', yet I managed to finish it after all. Then I thought to myself, what the hell is going on with me caring to check out such a 'clueless, mind-bending, tedious' film from director Charlie Kaufman who has created films so difficult to wrap your head around like 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', 'Being John Malkovich', 'Adaptation' and stuff. If you've happened to watch some of those like I have accidentally, you'd probably be ready to brace yourself for how 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' is going to get you! Still I find it exceedingly long and exhausting, and definitely harder to digest than any of Kaufman's works before.

The plot where a young woman is going with her boyfriend to meet his parents is constantly interrupted by seemingly irrelevant subplots that could've been (any)one's memories or hallucinations or imaginations from different time and space. Anyway don't try to outsmart it or make any sense of it because you can't, and it doesn't either. The only sensible part is probably the car trip in the beginning where you're kept being bombarded with conversations about musicals, poetry, life and stuff though, which I find a bit witty but at the same time quite boring! As it develops, it gets weirder and weirder, images dreamier and creepier, to a certain point that you'd just give up trying to understand what it's all about. So maybe the best way to enjoy it is, empty your mind, stop your thinking if you could, and simply flow with it, because the harder you try to get it, the further away you'll be from getting it!

There're tons of interesting quotes here for you to ponder like, 'people like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it's probably the opposite. We're stationary and time passes through us. Blowing like cold wind, stealing our heat.' You'd feel like it's saying something but you just can't seem to make head nor tail of it. Either you think it's too smart to be stupid, or too stupid to be smart, unless you drop your logical thinking and yearn for non-duality for a bit, there's no way you could appreciate a psychological trick like 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things'!