Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Directorial Vision:

Charlie Kaufman's cinematic milieu exists as an abstract characterization of escapism for escapist's; and that's the way we like it.

There his alluring semi-coherent cinematography both illuminates and mystifies the viewer and practitioner as cooperatives, dancing through an ethereal kaleidoscope of emotional vision and austere.

In terms of sourcing content for this wide-screen vision, Kaufman galloped to the forefront of the existentialism novelist mass, taking lain Reid's intimate and Dostoyevskian homage to heights only abridged within a nightmare of the sleeping mind.

The screen is unapologetically scored with malady, impulsivity and disgust; of the self and all others entwine.

Exploring masked scabs as reason for picking at and making bleed the intentions of allusion, with the abnormality that adjoins cold compositions of a confident insanity.

Kaufman's meticulousness is cathartic and efficacious.

A Socratic back-and-forth composed to polarise senses of suffering into a natural desire to be at the centre of arts purpose; to speak to us by the relentless love of passions gone awry.

The eerily familiar unbuttoning and bleak realness to the origins of thoughts predetermination; 'eating, shitting, sleeping'.

The Plot:

Delving much like other Avant-cinema classics through a dream-scape adaptation to reality (the non-real thought within a non-real thought within a real thought paradigm) viewers are left with a calming sense of hopelessness; an ideation borne by the most humanist delusion of all, control.

Structurally, but intentionally, the looming (A story) overshadows the undercurrent countermelody.

Which rings out, like a school-bell, the perusal and denigrate existence of perturbed custodial (B story) reimagining self-experience; played by Guy Boyd.

This by most means should de-escalate the (A story) journey of an unconvinced girlfriend to stay with her quiet and plaintive boyfriend.

Guising an innocuous visit to his parents amongst the fear of a blizzard and the inescapable doom of breaking things off; but don't worry, he's got snow chains if things get really substantial.

A quote that sticks with you, dominates you, erodes you, is one of female protagonist Jesse Buckley's opening lines...

"Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than the action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought"

Saying so in reference and introduction of her month long or maybe more boyfriend: Jake. Alluding to the prospective that she respects intelligent thought renditions as genuineness, when his actions display fake.

An ethos which ties strongly into the viewing experience, as most will be left questioning acts more than the thoughts of young-adult monologue-ist and her comprising antagonists.

It's an experience that is shared with Buckley's character and the viewer, discovering respectively our own fictional misery as past and future consolidations of fates cruelty.

"It's tragic how few people possess their souls before they die"

Performance Review:

Among the minerals of starlight directions to the unknown, Jessie Buckley gives a stunningly modal performance, accomplishing inner-confliction and uncertainty with a deft realness.

Buckley's voice a semi-choral guide which pulls the viewer into her characters heart and mind, within every insightful thought one can think, embellishing the radiance of a severely curious distrust.

Her snowy and sometimes emotionless composure is often endearingly colourful for being private yet jadedly personable, like the open diary of a complex human enigma, inviting and repelling all-at-once.

Playing against her external in-affectations, diminutive boyfriend Jake, played by Jesse Plemons encumbers the role of a full-of-pressure associate to compassion; in all the wrong ways.

Which I mean to say that Plemons is extremely convincing, supportively carrying the tension-bomb ticking beneath their feet.

In this state, his character like a half-limp system derides factious monosemic-ness, a one-way route to abiding the viewers relationship with him as a devoid sociopathic encyclopaedia. Educated in musicals, but ultimately a defiantly cloying apparition of misplaced cares and anger-dominant reactions to love.

The pair don't have what you might call a Danny-Sandy electricity, but you feel they have bonded through their isolating thoughts of endless indifference, which litters their minds, emotions and experiences with repetitive emptiness.

Their love a symbolic endlessness, ground clear in white snow blanketed pureness, new nothingness which like a parasite, suffocates its host as the peur de partir. (Fear of leaving).

A silent and draughty antiquated farmhouse owned by Jake's parents, stages the second act, played commandingly by Toni Collette & David Thewlis.

We feel mimicry of their lucidity to the active consciousness, the pair scattily hosting an evening of unforgettable Space-Odyssey-like visions, as cyclical, repetitive; uncertainly simultaneous.

The quartet discuss intimate topics upon marriage, love, awards, humility, abstract art and how couples meet.

They are homely but frazzled from hearing inflictions and their consequent toll on living with the hiss of whispering voices.

"it doesn't get any easier as it trudges along, I'll say that."

Their spoken tenses deceive the eye by tone and texture with the contextual explicitness of inevitability; donning the tenuousness of one's ever-weakening vitality.

And they, like us all, are too human to know anything else of horror, laughter and dance; but to thwart our wound's depravity.

Analysis:

What most inspired audiences will purposefully adore is Kaufman’s choice of the memoric truth; prevalent in his forerunning projects as debut 'Synecdoche' and serious Jim Carrey performance highlight 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.

For me it's the artisans’ material-less vision comically and cruelly prying with his watchers, like a cat with some string, doing so with the masterful conviction of an innovator.

Inciting most viewers to question: 'Will I ever know her real name?' (But in all honesty, it never really matters)

And by the time we hit the credits, all mistruths are forgiven as the film draws to its final conclusion; the symbolism of a dreaming realist identifying between endless and repetitive narratives, continuously colliding like gaseous atoms in a chamber.

Imploding human life into a singular mono-metric moment; the inevitable coldness of death.

Here Charlie's talented construction of visual narrative is at once bolder and more adventurous, sharper in weight the further one travels from the surface.

Where audiences are imbibed with stolen artistic musings, quotes from other quotes, recycling originalities which repeat and evolve over time, but are nonetheless the indiscernible pattern re-laid the same.

Watchers of this film will likely be impressed by its simplicity of narrative, location and symbolic design.

Presented consequences which settle upon the world frozen anew, sparkling like intelligently ambiguous glints, shimmering with the isolating spirit of regret.

Therein the vigil of possible impossibility, prophetic uncertainty and the unimaginable tumult.

It becomes clear after all, the films caricatured existence learning infinitely of its own futility and veering longwise into the nostalgia of thought and action as a warm blanket of snow.

Awaking the mindless sleep, asunder the blessings of a peaceful end, through the anecdotal fantasies of life, time and invulnerability.

Rating

A blistering reflection on the mood of 2020, the year of hopelessness.

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