Film Review

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) • Netflix

A young woman travels with her new boyfriend to his parents’ secluded farm.

In Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, almost nothing is what it seems. Indeed, by the end, one will question whether anything they’ve witnessed on-screen “really happened” in a literal sense. My guess is that around two-minutes near the end are intended to be taken as straightforward representations of events, but even that’s open to doubt in a film as strange, difficult, haunting, and addictive as Iain Reid’s 2016 novel.

The overwhelming unreliability of what we see and hear in I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t evident from the beginning, though. The film starts in a normal if sinister manner, with ominous music and a young woman’s voiceover accompanying shots of an empty house. Only later will we realise the character whose thoughts the monologue apparently represents, played by Jessie Buckley, never actually sees this house empty.

Soon the action proper starts, as the young woman — at this point called Lucy, although later her name seems to change several times…