“I was there with my girlfriend, we were celebrating our anniversary. You can’t even go for a drink, always being looked at. I was there with my girlfriend, we were celebrating our anniversary, stopped in for a drink and then this guy kept looking at me. “We never even talked, is the truth,” Buckley’s character says with frustration in one of the film’s climactic scenes. The actual connection between the young woman and Jake, we learn eventually from Buckley’s character, is barely existent. Loveless and lonely, Jake fantasizes extensively about what a relationship with Buckley’s character might have looked like. The pair’s car trip is likely the hallucination of a much older Jake, whose ungratifying work as a janitor at his former high school has led him to consider suicide (hence the double meaning of the phrase “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”). But these inconsistencies are intentional: by the end of the film (spoilers ahead! ) it becomes clear that Louisa/Lucia/Lucy/Amy/Yvonne is not a single woman, but a composite figment of Jake’s imagination. Buckley’s costume changes and accent switches would give a continuity editor an aneurysm. Once they sit down for dinner, Jake introduces her to his parents alternately as a poet and painter, a student of physics or of gerontology. Rather, she has many - Jake refers to her throughout their road trip as Louisa, Lucia, Lucy, Amy and even Yvonne. I say “Buckley’s character” because the young woman who narrates much of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” doesn’t actually have a name. None of the 2,300 comments on the “official discussion thread,” however, answered what I wanted to know most about the film: was Jessie Buckley’s character in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” supposed to be queer? But once the couple arrives at Jake’s home, the film spirals wildly - and unsurprisingly - into Kaufman’s trademark surrealism and I found myself again combing through Reddit as the credits rolled. As their car rolls through the snowy Sooner state, the erudite couple discusses Wordsworth and Italian railroad history as the young woman expresses her doubts about the relationship’s longevity in meditative voice overs. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” follows a young woman (Jessie Buckley) who reluctantly joins her new-ish boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) on a trip through rural Oklahoma to meet Jake’s parents, despite misgivings about the state of their relationship. However, the plot of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” Kaufman’s first feature in five years, seemed simple enough at first to spare me the same debrief. Slack-jawed after “Being John Malkovich, “ I turned to Reddit to explain the insanity I had just sat through. After my first foray into Kaufman’s filmography - “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ,” which warped my brain and broke my heart - it was Reddit users who helped me parse the complex chronology of Joel and Clementine’s relationship. To a cinema purist, perhaps leaning on Reddit to explain easter eggs in movies is “cheating.” But Kaufman’s self-conscious and intellectually exhausting films practically beg for annotation. Shortly after finishing director Charlie Kaufman’s newest film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things, ” I did what I always do after watching reference-heavy, brain-bending, complex movies: I fled to Reddit.
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