After an awkward dinner, time begins to mutate: Buckley’s character stumbles from room to room and encounters Jake’s parents at different ages. His mother is a homebody who’s so tightly wound, she’s practically snapped in multiple scenes, she reminisces on Jake’s childhood and adulthood almost simultaneously. The second act introduces Jake’s parents, an overbearing pair played by David Thewlis and Toni Collette. Jumping between mundane dialogue and fraught internal confession is a Kaufman specialty, and every pause in the script feels rife with tension. But the woman’s inner thoughts suggest something darker is afoot-she’s thinking of ending things, knows that Jake will never meet her parents, and is on the trip only out of curiosity. The early action is largely confined to a car on a snowy country road, where our heroine (played by Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons) banter amiably while driving to the farm where he grew up. But, as with all of Kaufman’s work, so much lies beneath those genre trappings. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based on the chilling novel of the same name by Iain Reid, and is presented as a horror movie, in which a routine trip becomes a nightmare. But as a director, he’s made only three feature films in 12 years, each of them a challenging and rewarding work. He’s a celebrated screenwriter, who won an Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If that sounds confusing, or even downright hostile to the audience, well, that describes the Charlie Kaufman experience. The viewer questions what is real and what is merely the echo of memory. But the strange conversations that drive the plot feel like they’re coming from dozens of voices and a thousand different directions. Only four major characters populate Charlie Kaufman’s new film, which debuts Friday on Netflix-a woman her boyfriend, Jake and his parents, whom she’s about to meet. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ That’s an Oscar Wilde quote.” So says the unnamed protagonist of I’m Thinking of Ending Things in one of her many internal monologues.
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