What things, exactly, are the protagonist of Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things thinking of ending? When the character, played by Jessie Buckley, first speaks those words in voiceover in the opening moments of the movie, it sounds like she’s contemplating suicide. But Kaufman soon introduces the young woman’s boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), and her inner monologue about their relationship shifts the meaning of those initial words, making it seem like she’s thinking of ending her romance with this man she doesn’t feel connected to. As the movie goes on, though, growing increasingly surreal and disjointed, it’s easy to wonder if this woman is actually thinking of ending all space and time.

Kaufman, of course, provides no easy answers, and anyone familiar with the filmmaker’s work wouldn’t expect him to. Especially since he started directing his own screenplays, Kaufman has specialized in the inscrutable, in movies that filter emotions through bizarre metaphysical scenarios and challenge the audience to establish connections with the characters. Adapted from the 2016 novel by Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is just as confounding as Kaufman’s previous directorial efforts, 2008’s Synecdoche, New York and 2015’s Anomalisa, with a central couple whose relationship is constantly in flux, an unreliable narrator and a plot that is constantly shifting direction.

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It’s impressively ambitious and strange, but it’s often tedious to watch, especially during the long car-trip sequences in which Jake and his girlfriend (whose name may be Lucy or Lucia or Louisa or Amy) talk in circles, quoting literature and philosophy and film at each other without ever communicating anything. Their inability to understand each other is part of the point, but their conversations are tedious rather than illuminating, and there’s no insight into intimacy or their individual mental states.

Lucy (or whatever her name is) narrates the movie incessantly, sometimes the dialogue even interrupts her voiceover, but she doesn’t seem to have an actual personality since the details of her life constantly change. She may be a poet, a painter or a physicist, but the poem she recites is actually a piece by Canadian poet Eva H.D. and the paintings she shows off come from museum prints. When she tries to make a point about a John Cassavetes movie, she just recites a Pauline Kael review verbatim.

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Jake and Lucy spend so much time in the car because they’re on a trip to meet his parents, who are also never named and are played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Once they arrive at the remote family farmhouse, everything there keeps changing, too. Jake’s parents are middle-aged and chatty, and then they’re elderly, suffering from dementia and barely able to get out of bed or feed themselves. Later, his mom is young, picking up toys that she says are Jake’s. Lucy doesn’t understand any of this, although Jake seems to just go with it, or perhaps he's used to the slippery nature of time in his home.

All of this uncertainty makes it impossible to get a handle on any of the characters, and while Buckley and Plemons give committed performances, Jake and Lucy never come across as actual people. Collette and Thewlis are suitably creepy as Jake’s parents, and the segment of the movie that takes place at the farmhouse features plenty of horror-movie elements, including an ominous locked basement with scratches on the door and evasive anecdotes about dead pigs. But I'm Thinking of Ending Things isn’t a horror movie, or even a meta deconstruction of horror movies, and Jake and Lucy spend less than half the movie with Jake’s parents.

Then they’re back on the road, stopping at a desolate ice cream stand in the middle of a snow storm, and eventually at Jake’s old high school, where the movie turns from surreal into complete nonsense, albeit nonsense that is artfully crafted and often mesmerizing. There have been flashes throughout the movie of an older janitor (Guy Boyd) at this same school, and that janitor may be Jake himself, or a manifestation of some aspect of his personality. Kaufman stages an entire dream ballet, the abstract style of dance sequence popular in classic movie musicals like An American in Paris and Oklahoma!, in the halls of the school, and while it’s beautiful to watch, it seems only tenuously connected to the story.

Like the works of David Foster Wallace and William Wordsworth, Oklahoma! is another piece of culture that Jake obsesses over, and Kaufman seizes on it for the movie’s bizarre, non sequitur finale. Unlike Reid’s novel, which concludes with a more conventional thriller-style twist, Kaufman’s film ends in complete opaqueness, dashing any hopes of resolution or narrative progression. It’s audacious and odd and unique, but it doesn’t really add up to anything.

Starring Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis and Guy Boyd, I’m Thinking of Ending Things premieres Friday, Sept. 4 on Netflix.

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