I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Book & Movie Review
Image Credit: I’m Thinking of Ending Things poster.
By: Ashley Welling
Dark, dreamlike, and deeply emotional, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the story of coming face-to-face with your past while grappling with the fear of what’s to come. While both the book and the movie follow the same general story, they are quite different in their details and execution. Here, we take a dive into both — looking at how two storytellers put their spin on fears we all face.
The Book
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a debut novel by author Iain Reid. It follows Jake and his girlfriend (the narrator whose name is purposefully never mentioned), as they drive through a winter storm to meet his parents for dinner at their remote farmhouse. Their long, winding drive through the snow is tense as Reid builds an environment that is quite disconnected from the world inside the narrator’s head. However, it’s when they reach his parent’s house that the reader starts to realize this world may not be all that it seems.
From the eerily familiar photos on the wall to the surreal way his parents change throughout dinner, it’s all very spooky and tension-building. The reader gets a bit of a deeper dive into Jake’s psyche, however, when the narrator makes her way to the basement — discovering paintings depicting a child with different ominous creatures looming over him. The heaviness of the moldy, dark environment coupled with a visual representation of what a weight mental health can be is told well here.
It’s in the final reveal that we get the most blatant explanation of what exactly is going on. Coming face-to-face with himself as a middle-aged janitor at a local high school, Reid reveals that the entire story has been a trip inside one man’s head. Guilt, regret, and the fear of what he feels like he has to do boil up and reach a truly heartbreaking climax.
Overall, Reid builds a world that’s tense, ominous, and beautifully surreal. Much of the details are left up to the reader’s interpretation, but we love a good enigmatic, spooky puzzle.
The Movie
Adapted and directed by Charlie Kaufman, the movie is less of a traditional horror film and more of an atmospheric journey through a dreamlike world of memories mixed with a fear of the future. Like the book, it follows Jake (Jessie Plemons) and Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as they travel to his parent’s house in the country. Unlike the book, the conversation is less focused on philosophy and instead on poetry, books, physics, and neurological degenerative disorders, suggesting that the Jake in the film is grappling with something a bit different than in the book.
The acting throughout the film is flawless. The tense scenes in the farmhouse feature Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) interrogating Lucy on details she can’t quite recall. The characters’ lapses in memory coupled with their ever-changing age and appearance give the sense that we are inside a mind that’s trying to work through quite a lot. It’s Lucy’s discovery of what’s in the basement, however, that gives audiences an idea of the reality he’s trying to keep out of his head.
Overall, what is real and what is imagined play together so seamlessly in the film that you feel as though you are moving from lucid to confused as much as Jake himself. And once you find out what it’s all about, your heart breaks all over again. If you’re ready for an emotional journey through our very human fear of what the end of our life brings, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a powerful exploration of just that.