![]() ![]() But if that struck you as an irritating non sequitur, then I have given you a reasonably accurate impression of Jake. As it all unfolded, I sometimes wondered if I were watching a mash-up of “Rebecca” and “The Shining” as directed by the late Abbas Kiarostami.Īctually, I wondered nothing of the sort. Here’s another: Is the Young Woman, as she’s billed in the credits, a painter, a waitress or a student? An expert on gerontology, cinema or the rabies virus? What we’re dealing with, in other words, is a nameless heroine, a troubled relationship, subzero temperatures, plot points that shift like quicksand and sustained behind-the-wheel cinematography. Or does she? That’s one of the movie’s more perplexing riddles. After a while, you realize you’re not entirely sure if her name is Lucy, or Louisa, or something else - which is odd, since she so clearly dominates the story’s perspective. Over the sounds of wind and snow, we hear her carrying on a fascinating conversation with herself and a slightly duller one with her boyfriend, whom she’s been dating for several weeks and doesn’t expect to be with for much longer. ![]() “I’m thinking of ending things,” the young woman thinks, over and over again, in a voice-over so persistent that there seem to be three people in the car, not two. Movies How Charlie Kaufman made the summer’s most mind-bending filmįor the cast of the new Netflix psychological thriller “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” making the film involved a journey into the mind of writer-director Charlie Kaufman. They’re as ideally matched as their names, even if their characters’ relationship doesn’t look long for this world. They’re played by Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, a nominal coincidence - a Jess-taposition! - that might have seemed like stunt casting if the two actors weren’t so suited to their roles. ![]() It’s a road-trip movie, a haunted-house movie and one hell of a long day’s journey into night.Ī young woman is driving with her boyfriend to visit his parents, making their way through a quickly intensifying Oklahoma blizzard. Adapted, reshuffled and significantly elaborated from a suspenseful 2016 novel by Iain Reid, the film begins as a tetchy-tender relationship comedy, then begins to disassemble and reassemble itself like a puzzle, all while forever threatening to morph into a horror flick. And this, sorry to pile on the paradoxes, has the curious effect of making it all seem even stranger. At one point, someone makes accidental reference to “quantum psychics,” a malapropism that perfectly describes Kaufman’s own field of expertise.Īt the same time, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” behaves in ways that no other Kaufman movie has, which is to say that sometimes, it almost (almost!) behaves like other, more conventional movies. And like “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine,” it delights in chasing its characters down the rabbit holes of consciousness. Like his recent puppet play, “Anomalisa,” it flirts with the delusion that the world, which may seem concrete to our eyes and ears, is a projection or an insidious conspiracy, perhaps even one of our own making. “I’m Thinking,” as it might just as well be called, is another of Kaufman’s patented studies in the transmigration of neurons. To say that he has done it again with “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” his infectiously digressive and beautifully controlled new movie, is to express a sentiment that is both accurate and misleading. It’s almost as if they can think for themselves. More than most movies, Kaufman’s can seem possessed of a strange, unnerving self-awareness. His first film as a director, the tragicomic fantasia “Synecdoche, New York,” threw off the dizzying sensation of watching a movie actively mastermind its own existence and eventual destruction: Thoughts became structures, structures became art, art became life (and vice versa), before it all came crashing down in one glorious meta-ruin.Īnd then there were his earlier, virtuosic screenplays for comedies like “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which had a way of making radical ideas seem disarmingly commonplace: What if we could hijack each other’s noggins or cut our emotional losses through selective amnesia? To watch those pictures was to see the answers being worked out thrillingly on the spot. ![]() It’s hard to think of a contemporary filmmaker who has taken the life of the mind quite as literally as Charlie Kaufman. ![]()
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