10 Movies You Weren't Supposed To Understand
7. I'm Thinking Of Ending Things
Oh boy. I'm Thinking Of Ending Things is a Charlie Kaufman movie that came out in 2020, and oh my god is it a Charlie Kaufman movie!
The film is completely divisive with audiences, with most people agreeing that the first part is a masterpiece while the second and third acts are overly drawn out and verging on nonsensical.
The movie follows "Lucy" as she and her boyfriend take a trip to his home town to visit his parents for the first time. Sounds simple right? Well what follows is a drama that sets out to confuse you for the entire two hour run time.
The story has no care for realism, as characters unexplainably age and de-age from scene to scene, references are made with no clarity to obscure pop culture events and the final act of the movie is just a mess of increasingly bizarre musical sequences that come out of nowhere.
Hell, we go from a strange interpretive dance sequence to an ode to a famous musical in a blink of an eye and it all comes without explanation.
The book the flick's based on does provide answers to the questions left ambiguous, however it's unclear whether Kaufman's take on the story matches up with these, as he neither confirms nor denies the book's conclusions in his own movie.
Kaufman didn't try to explain his directing choices once, instead choosing to make everything as ambiguous as it can be. And when the source material has such a strong message of regret and loneliness, it seems a shame for him to overlook this by leaving it up to the audience to decide what the meaning is - with most of them getting it wrong.