At Wits End: A Breakdown of the movie “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”

It seems like Netflix is releasing new original content just about every day. I decided to take a stab in the dark at one from the endless cornucopia of films and landed on “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”

What swayed me to watch this artistic drama was the internet’s polarized reaction to the film. While many have called it artsy and deep, others have passed it off as pretentious and redundant. Like any other casual film watcher, I wanted to decide who was right in this feud. So, I  buckled down and watched the movie that was — for lack of a better term — interesting.

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” has the foundation of an indie, dry, romantic drama. Our main protagonist is entitled “young woman” — we never learn her name — and she’s having trouble grappling with her desire to end her relationship with her boyfriend Jake, hence the title. Initially, I assumed the film would fit the same cookie-cutter storyline as other romance movies, but the director decided to use this as his canvas for a seriously unusual plot.

The first 30 minutes of the movie guides us through the young woman off on a trip to meet her slipping lovers’ parents  — the classic go-to plot of a young lovers’ story. During this half an hour, my mind dozed off to think of what could happen next to advance the uncomfortable situation she was in. This was partly due to the long, almost cumbersome, scenes of the two in a bland car driving through a pale blizzard as they ramble about poetry — maybe I should’ve paid attention to my sophomore year poetry unit after all.

For the rest of the movie, random and slightly off-putting things occur at the parents’ house — their dog shakes itself off for a relatively longer time than most dogs do, the young woman receives random calls from an ominous man and random cutaway scenes come in of a lonely high school janitor creepily staring at the students and performing mundane tasks.

Each conversation the young woman has with her boyfriend and his parents became increasingly confusing. It’s like their conversations divulged into the language of the Sims game. From the dinner table talk about the woman’s study of quantum “psychics” to the mother congratulating her son on his immense knowledge on “geniuses” the dialogue resembled the regurgitation of Campbell’s alphabet soup.

Now that I was engaged in the alluring yet confusing plot, I searched for a linear plotline. The parents started shifting through all ages in the course of a day — from bed-ridden to youthful — and there was eerie, symphonic music overlaid on the young woman endlessly walking up and down the main staircase.

I was slightly amused and extremely invested because it felt like a puzzle I had to solve. But, at some point the movie seemed to be a 1,000-piece puzzle with only 450 pieces in the box. I kept thinking these missing pieces had to be filled in with imaginative ideas or else the movie was a hodgepodge of theatre references and incoherent scenes cut together.

Staying with this movie takes a lot of focus to pick up on important lines of dialogue that are somewhat meaningful. It was hard for me to pick up clues of false realities and references to the future when they were lightly sprinkled in between pseudo-intellectual jargon over ganglia neurons and randomly interjected anecdotes about the main characters’ underwhelming science fair trophies. 

One of the most eye catching parts of this movie was the cinematography and colors used. Jake’s parents house was full of bright pinks and bright greens, which really help differentiate the moods of melancholy, unease and confusion in each scene of the movie. The scenes before entering the house were anxious and gloomy, resembled in the dark greys and white of the blizzard. However, in the house, the mood was more energized and frantic.

In between every important scene, there was a shift to long continuous shots of the couple driving through an endless blizzard. Bright lights and colors came with every new stop or destination. Sometimes it got monotonous seeing the two in the car, but it built up a slow-burn anticipation for the next mind-twisting scene.

This was far from a traditional film, viewing experience and more of an installation at an art museum. The ideals of inciting incidents and climaxes didn’t apply to this movie. In the case of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” I’m going to have to agree with the disinterested and confused viewers on Twitter — downplaying it as annoyingly pretentious. However, I can appreciate the boldness of this mind-boggling movie. If you’re interested in decoding the deeper meaning of suicidal thoughts and psychosis in the janitor’s head, I’d definitely give it a try. But if you need an interesting movie for a casual viewing, I’d suggest you gladly skip over this title.