Avis des critiques

The essentialist allegory of I'm Thinking of Ending Things posits that men flaunt their literacy and artistic knowledge to exert authority over women.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things creates a closed loop capable of neutralising any audience, parroting feminist critique and swallowing it immediately by reducing all ideas to a test of male intellect, precluding any actual ideas.

No fan of Charlie Kaufman's tormented burlesques, I was pleasantly surprised that I'm Thinking of Ending Things clicked near-instantly into place.

It helps to have read the book and so not wonder “what’s happening,” which is now fairly clear — a consciousness that’s projected itself into a hypothetical couple is retelling this narrative one more time, finally accepting that the relationship never happened while preparing for death — and simply marvel at its conceptual boldness.

This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.

This, arguably, is the writer-director’s bleakest film – surpassing even the drooping plasticine expressions and tragic narcissism of his stop-motion puppets in Anomalisa. It’s also one of his best.

Whether one is a fan of his particular brand of filmmaking or not, it’s clear that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the film that cements him as one of the smartest filmmakers of his generations. Showing more maturity and self-awareness than we’ve seen from him before, Kaufman has taken a story which seemed almost unfilmable and made it his own.

Charlie Kaufman’s latest is so good it induces separation anxiety.

The bar is low: pretty much every movie features characters with needs, wants, goals, desires, and pains, and it doesn’t take any great aesthetic imagination or artistic power to tell a humane story or to elicit sympathy.

Bewildered individuals at the mercy of chaotic, irrational, and insanely complex forces, the terror of trying and failing to relate to each other: Yup, we’ve been here all along, except things are way funnier now and more distressing.

The film is suspenseful because it generates uncertainty about its own premises.

The genius of Kaufman’s films – alongside their wild, dark imagination and the intense, A-game performances they inspire – is that they demand a meeting of minds. His and yours.