I’m Thinking of Ending Things Parent Guide

A young woman (Jessie Buckley) is privately having second thoughts about her ongoing relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons), but has agreed to drive out to his family farm to meet his parents. The drive intensifies her unease, as a nasty winter storm seems to be brewing, and she has work to do at home the next day – but once she arrives at the farmhouse, things go from worrying to bizarre. Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) are more than just a little strange, and things around her seem to be keeping up with the overall weirdness. Unfortunately, leaving is never as easy as we hope, and the young woman finds herself desperate to get out…

If you’re familiar with Charlie Kaufman’s other directorial work, you should have a pretty good idea what to expect here, although this veers a little towards the David Lynch end of the spectrum. I’m Thinking of Ending Things isn’t a movie for the casual filmgoer. You’re going to want to be prepared to do a lot of thinking and a lot of analysis before you sit down to watch this.

As with a lot of art films, there are some content concerns – although far fewer than I had anticipated. The only real violence takes place during the interpretive dance sequence (no, I’m not kidding), and is almost completely sterile and highly stylized. There is some brief sexual language and brief non-sexual posterior nudity, but nothing you couldn’t get away with in a PG-13 rated film. The biggest problem is the language, with nearly a dozen sexual expletives alone. In fairness, this was never intended for a family audience: even if this film were spotlessly clean, the odds of a kid enjoying this are slightly lower than my odds of winning the lottery.

This is one of those movies that expects the viewer to put in some work. It isn’t that you’ll miss anything shocking if you aren’t focused on the screen the whole time, this isn’t a cinematic “Where’s Waldo”. You’ll just be in a better position to make your own interpretations later if you try and contextualize, analyze, and digest things as you go along. I’m not going to tell you my conclusions, since I think most of the fun is to be had in the truly unsettling atmosphere of the film and in making your own determinations. I will say that I like weird movies, and I absolutely loved this one. It’s almost completely transportive: no matter where or when you watch this, you’ll feel like you saw it on an old projector in a basement at 3am. For me, that’s a good thing – but then, I’m fairly strange myself. Your mileage may vary.