![]() ![]() His name is Jake, but hers keeps changing, especially once they make it to the farmhouse and the weird family meal that awaits them. She is thinking of ending their relationship - they’ve only been going out for about seven weeks - but hasn’t worked up the gumption to do so yet. Based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel (though with an unmistakable Kaufman twist), it starts out as a story about a young woman (Jessie Buckley) who is embarking upon a road trip with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) at their farmhouse. I loved I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which is about as Kaufman-esque a movie as you could hope for. In Charlie Kaufman’s world, in movies like Anomalisa and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, our own narcissism and desperation to cure our loneliness conspire to form a maze from which we can never really escape. But while Kafka’s point is often social in nature, Kaufman’s is existential. They share a taste for the surreal and twisty they prefer you feel your way through their stories, rather than insisting on “solving” their plots like puzzles. In fact, Kaufman and Kafka aren’t entirely dissimilar. I’m still working up the courage to read it, for obvious reasons.) Since he first broke through in the 1990s, his style and themes have become so identified with him that it’s possible to call something “Kaufman-esque,” the way you might say something is “Kafka-esque.” (He also published his first novel this year, a 720-page doorstopper titled Antkind, about a failed film critic. He often plays with the form of the movies themselves, self-consciously flipping our expectations about truth and fantasy on their heads, which taught me, as a budding critic, how to look at a film as more than just its plot. ![]() Whether he’s writing screenplays for someone else or directing them himself, Kaufman has distinctive stylistic tics and thematic obsessions. Charlie Kaufman might be the reason I became a film critic, so of course I was excited for I’m Thinking of Ending Things, his latest movie. ![]()
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