I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Charlie Kaufman is a vortex of unfiltered fascination. Sooner than moving smoothly, it remains and grows until it evolves overwhelming, a quiet reflection on time, love, and the folly of life that changes from a standard set into a unique and one-of-a-kind. Sometimes, viewers might feel compelled to leave the ship and “end things” alone.

However, one must resist that temptation. The monotony of never-ending conversation and the annoying proliferation of side topics are disguises rather than pointless digressions. The most fundamental problem is beneath them: a young woman’s reluctance to end a relationship that is already deteriorating in its early stages.

Her inner voice drives the narrative, which expresses how bored she is with Jake, stuck and lifeless, even though everything is new. She already knows it will not last. However, as their journey leads them to Jake’s parents’ home, the familiar collapses into the grotesquely surreal: his mother and father appear to slip between life stages at random, aging and de-aging as if time were malfunctioning. Parallel to this uncanny is the presence of a janitor, alone in a deserted school, watching the film unfolding as though he were both spectator and silent author.

The film develops more like a journey through layers of desire, regret, and memory than it does like a straightforward narrative. The audience is drawn into its shifting currents by its strangeness, which is eerie, captivating, and impossible to describe. It feels like a rehearsal of reality.

The movie handles emotion like a dream: slick, erratic, and ephemeral. Every scene with Jake’s parents feels like stepping back in time, with their identities constantly changing, while the spectral janitor lingers in Jake’s fluctuating moods. On the other hand, the janitor is confined to his exile and forced to roam the school’s purgatorial hallways.

The young woman, who ought to be our anchor but never is, is addressed by various names, refracted into incompatible identities, and dissolves into a question mark, which is more of an unstable ontology than a character.

The janitor once watched a cheesy Robert Zemeckis romance about a waitress who falls in love. The line between fiction and the movie we believed we were watching is blurred when the young woman herself reappears a few moments later as a waitress at Jake’s family dinner. As though his perception were scripting reality, the janitor overhears a stray conversation in another scene, only to have it reenacted between Jake and the young woman in the following scene. His gaze becomes the axis on which the narrative turns.

Kaufman’s invitation unnerves the audience by pulling them from passive observation and thrusting them into the uncomfortable task of introspection. The film blurs the boundaries between memory, dream, and reality, creating vertigo. Watching it is more about entering a mind than following events; it is a confusing journey that shows how brittle the lines are between perception and truth, between self and story, and between boundaries that may never have existed in the first place.

The movie’s opening line is I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The girlfriend’s repeated statement initially gives the impression that she is merely considering ending the relationship. However, beneath the surface, it alludes to Jake’s own suicidal thoughts that are resonating from his broken mind.

The meaning of the title becomes clear as the narrative progresses. Jake is a prediction of the individual he hopes he was, made from memory, creativity, and shame. The woman switches names and identities, evolving a mythologized idea of a natural individual. Jake is both curator and captive of his views in a theater corrupted by loneliness.

Via detailed dreams and trials of alternative lives, he encourages the fantasy of potential, of roads not taken. Nevertheless, Reid’s initial book confuses this by fracturing the view between the first and third individuals; it changes Jake into both subject and object, self and stranger, never graspable.

Kaufman’s adaptation creates an internal excavation, a world in which hallucinations and reality blend until psychological suffering is indistinguishable from the outside world. In order to “understand” the film, one must submit to its multi-layered structure, which is composed of fantasy, hopelessness, and unrelenting self-examination, rather than following its plot.

The film initially veers toward horror with its abrupt changes, uneasy domestic situations, and twisted timeline. Horror, however, is merely a façade. Beneath it is a psychological thriller that analyzes regret, loneliness, and the precarious foundation of human life. Like the young woman’s unseen landscape painting, which is never shown but instead evoked, the film evokes sadness rather than portrays it, drawing the audience into its mood. Kaufman, who still produces pain, depends on suffering in the medium.

As the snowstorm worsens, the superficial terrain images Jake’s interior: lonely highways, freezing air, and an overpowering night from all flanks. The janitor, separated within his pure school halls, evolves both surrogate and cipher at Jake’s earlier cloud and a mirror for the audience, a weak condensation of human desire and futility.

Instead of being resolved, the movie is a meditation, an experiment transforming desperation into texture and emotion into atmosphere. It compels the audience to confront the intolerable ambiguities of mortality, fantasy, and memory. An introspective ache, a philosophical vertigo, and an unwavering realization that the human psyche is its own most terrifying landscape are all left after the credits have faded.

The janitor is an archivist of lives. Beyond watching films in solitude, he has spent decades witnessing students cycle through the institution while he remains invisible, a presence unnoticed. He hears, he sees, yet he is never truly seen.

The story’s center of gravity shifts when Kaufman guides us into Jake’s childhood bedroom, a shrine cluttered with books and films. Moreover, in the “forbidden” basement, the most damning clue waits: work clothes marked with the same insignia as the janitor’s uniform, tumbling in the washing machine. What at first appeared as two parallel threads collapses into one: Jake and the janitor are two temporal selves of the same man.

This insight reflects on perception rather than concluding the story. Jake appears as a figure divided in two, reflected through the glimmer of childhood dreams and the gloomy shadow of past mistakes. He bears the weight of reality and the pain of possibility, the gap between what life could have been and what it has become. Thus, the movie promotes these unique hells into ubiquitous existential needs by producing loneliness, individuality, and mourning instead of just showing them.

By dropping us into Jake’s mind, Kaufman involves the viewer: are we not all voyeurs of other lives, whether via books, films, or the infinite scroll of the digital spread? We create stories from details of what we notice, turning outsiders into characters in the personal narratives of our senses. Word becomes a record of authorship; for this reason, Jake’s vision is normal.

Through Jake’s role as janitor, the movie functions as a dramatization of human affect. He creates a fictional version of his own life by stitching memories and desires together after witnessing a lifetime of other people’s stories. His speculative longing is reflected in his distorted visions of his parents, whose varying ages reflect the passage of time. This play reflects the human tendency to second-guess choices, envision different outcomes, and linger on the regretful “what ifs” that pierce the present.

Jake’s fate (falling into the anonymity of custodial work) becomes almost symbolic. How can a mind that is so expansive and restless be bound to such a diminished situation? The janitor’s job is more than just a job; it is a metaphor for stalled ambition turned to routine and genius smothered by the gradual accumulation of neglect. Even though his life is noticeably incomplete, his bucket and mop (basic maintenance tools) double as tools of existential maintenance, erasing the marks of others.

The movie’s last act reduces this concern. The young woman abruptly removes her zeal in a hallway chat with the janitor. She says she fears him, quivering as if he were an intruder. This change reframes Jake’s stories as unilateral arms. To her, he is a foreigner, even a threat. In this moment, the gulf between self-perception and how others perceive one yawns open, exposing Jake’s dread that he is, and always has been, a lonely, unwanted figure on the periphery.

In Reid’s book, Jake is an awkward young man whose privacy represents life. His occasional incursions into the general globe produce small results; during a trivia night at a bar, he meets a young woman who beams but withholds her number. This quick motion evokes the seed of addiction. In his final hours, Jake torments himself with the counterfactual: would having her number have changed his future? However, the question, suspended in the fog of regret, becomes paradoxically both impossible to answer and irrelevant. The future, for him, has already collapsed.

As the janitor, Jake manufactures an ornate story of the young woman, pieced together from the remains of his artistic consumption, movies, books, chunks of conversation, and half-remembered images. She was slightly more than a foreigner; it was a short meeting that metastasized into a lifelong obsession.

Her identity in the movie is mercurial, moving like quicksilver: At one point, she is a physicist, at another a poet, repeating Eva H. D.’s Rotten Perfect Mouth, a book Jake struggles with in his childhood room. Each incarnation is less about her than about him, his projections, desires, and his failure to distinguish fantasy from lived experience.

On the road to Jake’s parents’ house, the woman suddenly smokes a cigarette, a detail out of sync with her previous persona. The gesture crystallizes Jake’s contradictory longing: He yearns for a partner who is alluring in a conventional, romantic sense and intellectually formidable, a combination that exists only in his imagination. Per change highlights her character’s flux because she is never an individual in her own freedom but a collage of Jake’s wishful thoughts.

Shame, of course, is the incredible democratizer of human knowledge. It plagues in various records: the sting of a single flawed conclusion, the pain of a neglected option, the sarcastic hope for lives unlived. Most disciplining is the dissonance between the bright stories we create and the harsh saying of what really grows. This dissonance explains Jake’s whole reality. His life, like so many others, is less lived than mourned.

The audience gleans a portrait of a man consumed by failure from the fragments presented in Kaufman’s film, Jake’s essays, his confessions, and his endless digressions. He regrets that his romantic life was never pursued, his parents were never entirely pleased, and his career was never achieved. Above all, he regrets his own invisibility. Shame evolves his preferred habitat, a self-imposed jail. Instead of changing his course, Jake deadens himself with stories, rehearsing opportunities while crawling through the blizzard of his own sanity. The streets are limited, the night lasting, yet he cannot proceed past the stiffness of vision.

Kaufman’s inclusion of Oklahoma!*, which is missing from Reid’s book, provides a crucial psychological hint. It represents Jake’s shattered psyche more than it does a cultural allusion. The distinction between his reality and the fantasies he creates about himself is blurred when he watches students practice the musical. It is a smaller tribute than pathology: Jake reimagines his life via the grammar of interpretation, where passion and fantasy cloud seamlessly.

One of the songs from Oklahoma! stages a romance between a dashing farm girl and her charming suitor, a melody steeped in false optimism and theatrical cheer. Kaufman shifts that desire into something cold and basically knocking.

In the last act, Oklahoma!, a dreamlike ballet reenacted in a school hallway, is incorporated into Jake’s story. Jake transitions into the roles, throwing himself as Curly and the woman as Laurey. Nevertheless, Jud, the sinister farmhand, starts encroaching upon the trance, tumbling into Jake’s understanding of self, an older, broken version of the man he hopes to be, the janitor creeping under the hero’s show.

At this point, Jake faces the numerous painful recognitions: he is not Curly, the ideological leader, but Jud, the antagonist, separated, poisoned, and bitten by frustration and loneliness. The story takes place in the school auditorium set, Jake’s body aged by heavy cosmetics, Oklahoma’s religious joy threatening the set. His mother appears beside him, spectral and complicit, while an audience of teenagers in grotesquely antiquated stage paint watches as Jake delivers his final, delusional speech before surrendering to death.

Jake withdraws into Jud’s “Lonely Room,” which is now cluttered with mementos from his early years, making it difficult to distinguish between his past and his demise. He sings it as a desperate attempt to win the woman’s love. However, this fantasy is merely another momentary reprieve from the unavoidable; his life has been nothing but mistrust, suffering, and rigidity.

The film’s ending shot, Jake’s car planted in snow outside the school, his body stilled in the night, causes his death with a mysterious combination of looks and desolation. It is the ideal epitaph for a guy destroyed by unrealized possibility, who died taking his losses as tightly as his ambitions. Kaufman rejects nostalgia here; he does not cover the difficult importance of human feeling, but rather causes us to pause and remember it.

The movie is more of an elegy on the pointlessness of self-delusion than a narrative. It is layered, contradictory, and recursive, making it impossible to understand in a single viewing, much like Synecdoche, New York. The last act resolves nothing; instead, it only intensifies into an unsettling, tightening spiral of meaning.

Kaufman’s central themes (aging, love, identity, and existence) are touched upon. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a study of longing and guilt, and it acts as the eerie dreams are the ones we make up for ourselves, and it lingers with the aftertaste of despair.

References

  • Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.
  • Camus, A. (1991). The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1942).
  • Hammerstein, O., & Rodgers, R. (1943). Oklahoma! [Musical]. Rodgers & Hammerstein.
  • Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge.
  • Kaufman, C. (Director). (2020). I’m Thinking of Ending Things [Film]. Netflix.
  • Kotsko, A. (2011). Awkwardness. Zero Books.
  • Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18.
  • Perkins, C. (2021). The Unbearable Interior: Time and Memory in Charlie Kaufman’s Cinema. Film-Philosophy, 25(2), 250–268.
  • Reid, I. (2016). I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Simon & Schuster.
  • Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
  • Žižek, S. (2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (2nd ed.). Routledge.