The chair his mother uses is in the apartment we see the janitor in and the opening shots show a house that is tellingly empty. Following the logic that this film is the final fantasy of the now grown up Jake – aka the janitor – we see from the long dinner sequence Jake caring for his mother as she deteriorates and finally passes and his father mourns her. Jake’s parents are real but they are also dead.
#Im thinking of ending things thriller movies movie#
In the book this is a much bigger and scarier deal – the phone calls are coming from her own number, and this is somewhat echoed in the film – the names that pop up are Louisa and Yvonne – Louisa is the name Jake’s parents give the narrator, Yvonne is the name of the heroine from the movie the janitor watches, who appears in the car at one point. He’s reciting the strange mantra that is later the answer phone message that the narrator receives. In an early scene we see the janitor staring out of the window of his home. Through Jessie Buckley’s voice we understand this to mean that she’s thinking of breaking up with Jake, but on a second watch however it’s clear Jake – or rather the grown up Jake, who has become the janitor, is thinking of ending his life. The film opens with shots of an empty house with the narrator’s voice over which begins with ‘I’m thinking of ending things’. Jake and the Janitor are the same person. More on that in a bit… Jake and the janitor The two reach a crisis point when Jake insists on driving to his old school to dispose of their unfinished ice cream cups and he enters the school leaving her in the car. Over the course of what appears to be a single night, the two live out what amounts to an entire relationship – the changes of clothes support this – not only is Jake trying out different looks but it also gives the sense that they have been at the farm house not for just one night but for many years. His idealised girl is a feminist so when he makes a joke referencing the song ‘baby it’s cold outside’ they row. He doesn’t like the Pauline Kael version of her, he’s intimidated. In this version the narrator was a waitress, and Jake a customer, like in the movie – and at one moment on the journey back after the visit to the farm house the narrator briefly switches from Jessie Buckley to Colby Minifie who plays the waitress in the film.Įven though he is imagining his idealised version of a woman he doesn’t know, Jake still manages to envisage a relationship that goes sour. Later, though, their meet-cute becomes one transposed from the romcom that the janitor (Guy Boyd) is watching (more on him later). Even their origin story changes – the story about the quiz is told by the narrator in a sort of giddy haze, laughing too loudly and talking about how attractive and smart Jake seemed, how his quiz team’s name was Brezhnev’s Eyebrows and how he’d explained to her who Brezhnev was (he wants a smart girlfriend, but he wants one who acknowledges that he is smarter than her). The narrator is an idealised version of what Jake thinks a girl he met at a pub quiz in a bar might be like. She’s a poet – but the poem is just a poem in a book in Jake’s room, and she’s a film critic – we see Jake has a massive book of Pauline Kael’s work and later she embodies Kael. She’s an artist – but of course we learn that the art she shows Jake’s parents is in fact existing art that Jake likes and tries to copy in the basement. Her personality changes too, at points being domestic goddess, at others formal dinner guest, and her job changes – physicist, gerontologist, waitress.
Her name does too – Lucy, Louisa, Lucia etc. We see this in a number of ways throughout.
Jake and the narratorĮven though we are told the story through the eyes of the female narrator (Jessie Buckley) she isn’t real. However, here’s our attempt to explain what’s going on. Yep it’s a movie, and a book, which really requires you to watch/read twice to actually fully understand.Īnd even then things aren’t crystal clear or cut and dried. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is no less oblique, no less confusing, particularly if you haven’t read the book and only want to watch the movie once.
It’s based on the novel by Iain Reid, which is also a mystery, and it’s adapted by Charlie Kaufman, a man with a history of playing around with concepts of fiction and reality in his screenplays such as Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. Netflix chiller I’m Thinking of Ending Things has arrived to confuse and bemuse.
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