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Review
I’m Thinking of Ending Things, review: welcome to the horror of homecoming
In Charlie Kaufman’s magnificent, unsettling film, a young woman joins a rural Oklahoman homestead where nothing is as it seems
- Dir: Charlie Kaufman. Cast: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Guy Boyd. 134 min
What connects “Lonely Room”, the tragic ballad of farmhand Jud Fry from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, with the old Frank Loesser number “Baby, it’s Cold Outside”? How does a maggot-infested pig, which comes to brief, animated, and surprisingly chipper life, inhabit the same film as a word-for-word re-enactment of Russell Crowe’s Nobel prize acceptance speech from A Beautiful Mind – complete with a savage parody of its ageing make-up?
To answer these and other quandaries, you’ll need to watch (not read) I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Advance word on Charlie Kaufman’s new film – as if we could trust that – was that it was a safe retreat into adaptation, an easier bet for green-lighting and purchase by Netflix after the commercial failure of his last two features.
But Kaufman’s idea of adaptation is not exactly like anyone else’s. We know this, because he wrote a whole film about it, Adaptation, in 2002. The thriller he chose here, a debut by Canadian writer Iain Reid, gave him a puzzle-box concept, but the levels of sheer weirdness he inflicts on its skeletal outline amount to a next-level Kaufman-isation in the best possible way. In short, he’s back, and his film leaves your head spinning.
Ask yourself, an hour in, what we truly know about the character played with near-magical depth by Jessie Buckley, who is being driven through a blizzard by her relatively new boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents at their run-down farm, in the rural area called Tulsa County. (We’re in Oklahoma, which proves important.) She barely seems to know her own name. We think it’s Lucy, at least initially, though Jake – an earnest intellectual who corrects others’ speech and asks which books they’ve read – affects a “Lucia” soon enough, and then suddenly she’s “Louise”.
Their long car journey in and out of this wintry visit is the most cheerless and uneasy in recent cinema, becoming a pitch-black odyssey through the snow, which ought to raise red flags, in this thriller-ish context, for the basic safety of both. But forget their safety: their very existence is higher up our worry list. Buckley’s voiceover tells us she wants the relationship done with, and her every glance out of the passenger window – sometimes directly into the camera’s eye – is a profoundly disconsolate plea for escape.
Jake just ploughs on at the wheel, with the learned, doomed equivalent of small-talk. Things only get more bizarre when they pull up at his mom and pop’s – there’s Toni Collette, waving for far too long from an upstairs window – and he delays this bound-to-be-awkward encounter with an “abridged tour” of their crummy old place. The way an upper-storey barn door swings open in the wind could haunt your nightmares. But wait for what’s dead in the doorway, and no one even cares. Wait for the dog, a border collie that just isn’t normal. Get ready for a woebegone candlelit roast, laid on in a heartbeat.
Nothing is meant to scan here as anyone’s average reality – least of all Collette’s hysterically oversolicitous, sunken and sad mother, or David Thewlis as her husband, a gruff northerner who calls Billy Crystal (of all people) a “nancy”. The dinner is pork, just after we’ve heard the hideous story of that maggoty pig that seems to haunt Jake’s very being. Between scenes, Collette and Thewlis age up and down inexplicably by decades, according to Kaufman’s whims, and both are supremely good at seeming close to death in this mangy hovel, while also putting on a show of cheery/manic banter across the sweetcorn. How is it, mom asks, that Jake and Lucy (is it Lucy?) first met?
There hangs a story about an off-campus bar quiz, starting with pretentious team names (a Jake speciality), and ending with the courage plucked to get digits. But we keep wondering about another story entirely, involving a character who barely speaks but hovers around the film’s edges for fifty or so years. He’s a janitor at the county high school, played by 77-year-old Guy Boyd – an invisible man, nearly, mocked for his stoop and air of shambles by the perky student body. He’s been witness to their productions of Oklahoma! five times a generation, while he Windexes partitions and mops the echoing corridors. Lost in permafrost, he’s like a hapless cousin of Jack Torrance – family-less, and on a much lower pay grade – but he’s not much of a threat, other than to himself.
It’s no wonder the proto-incel Jud Fry – played by an unforgettably disturbing Rod Steiger in 1953 – is an iconic figure on this film’s whopping mood board. If you were out of sorts with Kaufman, you could call him out for the sheer number of metacinematic tricks he chooses to pull – there’s a dream ballet, with indoor snow, at the exact moment where the story calls for stabbings and twists spelled out. Kaufman merely alludes to the twists (by alluding to other films) and trusts us to grasp his logic.
Some of the most brilliantly performed scenes are conversations with or about films. Antkind, Kaufman’s exhausting debut novel, did a lot of this, but the reader felt stuck with the only performance possible on the page – the writer’s own one. Here we have Plemons, playing a schlubby, clever-clever beta male who can’t help but broadcast his worst qualities, as keen for you to listen as Blur’s “Charmless Man”. No one’s listening. When he awards himself points for intelligence, you recognise, shun and pity him all at once. It’s a major performance. Collette mesmerises as the more distraught half of a Punch-and-Judy parent show.
And there’s Buckley, remarkable throughout at taking Kaufman’s most out-there notions – scan the books in Jake’s childhood bedroom for plenty of extra clues – and giving them flight. Blowing raspberries and stabbing her thumb, one moment she’s channelling Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) – a movie Jake reveres, claiming to identify with its broken, wronged heroine. The next moment, lighting a cigarette that seems to come from nowhere, she’s Pauline Kael, telling him he’s entirely wrong, and launching for minutes into a verbatim chunk of Kael’s famously agnostic review.
There was no interrupting Kael in full flow. Buckley commits to this mad set-piece, and to a poem her character says she’s written (it’s called “Bonedog”, by Eva HD), which is about the horror of homecoming, with a bravura that can’t possibly exist on the page – or in anyone’s head.
We know she’s desperate not to be in this insane situation, so much so that someone, somehow, must have coerced her into it – that’s surely Jake’s department. But someone also had to cast the role, and turn her from a trapped notion into a squirming human entity who’s bizarrely understandable, fiercely alive, and means something. That was Kaufman. He did one heck of a job.
On Netflix from Friday September 4