The films of Charlie Kaufman are a little heady, and you don't need a film degree to know that. Being John Malkovich, the first major motion picture made from one of Kaufman's scripts, follows a struggling puppeteer who finds a portal into actor John Malkovich's head. Adaptation, meanwhile, is Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of the book The Orchid Thief, which follows a protagonist named Charlie Kaufman struggling to write a screenplay adaptation of the book The Orchid Thief.
Charlie Kaufman's movies and scripts can often portray existence as something out of a dream but not necessarily one of the good dreams. The characters' neuroses manifest outside of their minds, and the results are usually the last thing you'd expect.
Do you really need to know any of this before you watch the latest movie that Kaufman has written and directed? Maybe, maybe not, but it probably couldn't hurt. So let's dive into his latest metaphysical thriller, I'm Thinking Of Ending Things, before it hits
Netflix on September 4.
The concept of "meeting the parents" is familiar to anyone who's ever been in a relationship. On the surface, i'm thinking of ending things has a pretty standard premise: A woman travels to meet her boyfriend Jake's parents for the first time. But where, say, Meet the Parents was a goofy comedy featuring Robert De Niro asking if Ben Stiller could milk him, Kaufman's film takes a decidedly darker approach.
Based on the 2016 book of the same name by Canadian writer Iain Reid, i'm thinking of ending things is a surreal dive into the woman's relationship with her boyfriend, not to mention her relationship with herself. Both dreamlike and unsettling, the film offers visions from the past and future, internal monologues that don't quite stay internal, and a very wet, very shaky dog.
In 2019, actor Jesse Plemons, who plays Jake, revealed in a GQ interview that Kaufman's adaptation of Reid's book kept, quote, "maybe 15 percent of the dialogue." That ought to be your first clue that, like Adaptation before it, I'm Thinking of Ending Things will make something wholly original and unique from the book it's based on.
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