5 Years Ago, A Misunderstood Director Adapted An Impossible Thriller

For a man who wrote an entire movie about how awful adapting a book into a movie can be, Charlie Kaufman has really developed it into a unique skill. The Oscar-winning screenwriter is best known for original stories like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he’s recently branched out and adapted a children’s book into the surprisingly cerebral animated movie Orion and the Dark.

Even both of his upcoming projects are adaptations, one of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and another of Iddo Gefen’s short story “Debby’s Beach House.” All these projects can be traced back to one of Kaufman’s finest achievements: a seemingly impossible adaptation that took an inscrutable book and turned it into a hauntingly beautiful thriller that hid its secrets in plain sight.

In 2016, Iain Reid published I’m Thinking of Ending Things, a short horror novel that shifted perspective from a woman on a long drive to visit her boyfriend’s parents for the first time, and two police officers discussing some mysterious tragedy that occurred. It’s a story that’s unafraid to spend a whole chapter on the protagonist telling an anecdote about learning to drive, but ends with twist after twist, revealing that the main character isn’t at all who we thought. It’s such a severe case of unreliable narrator that, if you listen to the audiobook, the narrator literally changes 75% of the way through the runtime.

When Charlie Kaufman announced he was going to write and direct an adaptation for Netflix, fans were understandably dubious. His first foray in directing, the brilliant meta-surreal movie Synecdoche, New York, was considered a flop, and his next movie, Anomalisa, was equally strange. This story seemed just as abstract, if not more so. But the end result, released in the first few months of lockdown, was infinitely relatable.

The story follows an un-named (or, more accurately, many-named) woman (Jessie Buckley) as she embarks on a road trip with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons). When they arrive at his parents’ Oklahoma farmhouse, his mom (Toni Collette) and dad (David Thewlis) pull the couple into a strange spiral of time folding in on itself.

But that’s only the first act of the story. When Jake and his girlfriend leave the house and drive through the snow back, the surreal nature follows them, leading them to a public school after hours. It’s only there we can peek through the levels of delusion to see what is really going on in this relationship.

Unlike the book, the movie pulls from constant pop culture references. Snippets from poems, Pauline Kael movie reviews, and famous paintings all play a role, and there’s even a rom-com movie-within-a-movie that adds another layer. Theatre performance has always been a feature of Kaufman’s works, and in I’m Thinking of Ending Things it reaches a new height: a dream ballet, the classic theatrical device complete with dancers replacing the actors to tell the story of their love through interpretive dance.

It all builds to one of the greatest movie endings of the 2020s so far: Jake singing “Lonely Room” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, the only song that didn’t make the jump from stage to the movie adaptation. It’s a song about a man realizing he’s wasted his life, and if you’ve paid attention to the clues so far, it’s hard not to read Plemons’ tear tracks through his old age makeup as anything other than the darkest possible fate.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is by no means a breezy watch. It’s a puzzle that keeps you guessing if you can believe anything you see, only to state the true meaning explicitly towards the end. But if you buy into its delusions and keep an eye out for the subtle clues, it transforms from an abstract thriller to a melancholy meditation on what happens when loneliness takes over.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is now streaming on Netflix.