I get that Collette, in particular, excels at this sort of domestic-horror perversity, à la Hereditary, a modern elevated-horror classic I am too much of a scaredy-cat to engage with beyond its Wikipedia plot summary. It is an Oscar-feted screenwriter’s self-parody of Weird Parents on a Farm grotesquery it is not to be borne. This is the point at which date night-Jake’s, and also yours-disastrously implodes.Īs the parents in question, Toni Collette and David Thewlis grimace and contort and cry-laugh and softly groan and silently shriek and in general carry on like Tool-video iterations of themselves. Just galactically awkward, like that episode of The Office everyone loves but 10 times longer and worse, like every single mumblecore movie playing on the same theater screen simultaneously, like a full-body cringe that grinds your whole skeleton into dust. Her only real goal, then, is to survive, and principally to survive her dinner with Jake’s parents, which is the centerpiece of the movie and also is unbearable. In either medium, her character-unnamed in the film, or rather her name and occupation and whole-ass personality keep changing-is clearly less a human woman than somebody’s wobbly idea of a human woman, and the drama lies in discovering whose idea she is, exactly. In the movie, vivacious Irish actress Jessie Buckley (she of righteous country-music drama Wild Rose) plays the woman, and the mighty Jesse Plemons plays Jake, patrolling as usual the fine line between everyman decency and chilly unease. The shock ending is not totally shocking, if you’ve read or watched enough creepy thrillers, but in 200 or so deceptively breezy pages there is plenty of dense, unsettling atmosphere with which to enrich and/or pollute your weary brain. It’s horror, albeit psychological or “elevated” horror, to the extent you’re willing to stomach that term at all. Somewhere in there is a pig, but not a cartoon pig, an elderly janitor but not a elderly janitor. Afterward, despite the blizzard, they stop at a creepy ice-cream joint, then at a way creepier old high school. Reid’s novel is narrated by a young woman going on her first long car trip with her new boyfriend, Jake, to meet his parents at his childhood farmhouse. The movie is remarkably faithful, at least plot-wise, to its source material, given that for Adaptation Kaufman wrote a whole-ass screenplay about the bleak + whimsical folly of trying to adapt a semi-famous book. It helps if you understand that at this point you’re not so much watching a Charlie Kaufman joint as surviving it.Īnd so it goes with I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Canadian author Iain Reid. It helps, watching these movies, if you’re scared of death it helps if you’re scared of your own reflection it helps if you’re scared of girls. He likes puppets and psychedelic animation and other multimedia head trips. He’s spectacularly dour to an extent that is almost, but not quite, funny. (I loved Synecdoche, which ends with the word die, and I never want to think about it again.) As, more recently, a cultier writer-director-starting with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York and 2015’s Anomalisa, which scored him his fourth screenwriting Oscar nom-he got way less whimsical and much, much, much bleaker. As a superstar screenwriter-1999’s mighty Being John Malkovich and 2002’s Adaptation earned him Oscar nominations, and 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind brought him the win-he specialized in trippy, cerebral, whimsically bleak tales of cracked identity and bad romance. Your old pal Kaufman, of course, is a date night terrorizer by design. (You fart around in the Psychological Thrillers section and you get what you deserve.) Let’s just say if you pick this for date night, your significant other might not let you pick the movie again for months. Let’s just say I feel terrible for anybody who stumbles across this sucker due to some sort of Netflix algorithm catastrophe. Let’s just say the redactions are horror-adjacent. The redactions are not spoilers, exactly: I’m Thinking of Ending Things-which hit Netflix last Friday and is written and directed, in all its dreary + eerie + fucked up + polarizing + baffling glory, by your old pal Charlie Kaufman-is not exactly spoilable. I should be more specific: A cartoon pig trudges down a high school hallway, trailed by the elderly janitor. A cartoon pig trudges down a high school hallway, trailed by the elderly janitor.
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