Saw I'm Thinking About Ending Things, a complex, ominous film by Charlie Kaufman. This film is focused on a woman who is thinking of "ending things." The film implies she's thinking of breaking up with her incel-like boyfriend however, Charlie Kaufman not being one for half-measures, explores the other common use of that phrase: death and suicide.
The film starts with the couple travelling to the guy's family farm. It's heavily coded as a place of death and entrapment. The barns are rotting, the screen door is torn. The girl is dressed in bright reds that fade to pinks and blacks and then to blues the longer she stays. There is a dog who is only shown in isolation, forever shaking its head - disconcertingly disappearing between cuts. The film is intentionally dream-like and off-putting. Netflix bills it as a horror, but it's a creeping, baffling kind of horror, like a David Lynch film.
The ending of the central relationship is linked to the ending of life - a destruction and dissolution, making everyone increasingly confused and foggy before the end arrives. Then again, of course, being trapped in a bad relationship is another sort of death - a living death of embalmed stasis. Again and again the girl pleads with the boy to leave the farm house. She lists many different reasons to leave: she must work on her essay, she has to do research, she has an early shift, but still they linger and linger as the storm gets worse outside and his parents keep aging.
The film also brings up notions of consent and agency. This girl seems to be kept against her will, imprisoned in the farm house and later in the car. In a relationship is either party (can either party) be fully aware of what they're consenting to? And what about the larger, echoed theme? None of us consented to be born, you know. The big and small anxieties of life and relationships keep echoing and reflecting each other, making big questions small and small questions big. Later in the film, a pig explains a little: everything is like everything if you look closely enough. Pigs are often used as a symbol for death in this film.
The boy in the film is deeply creepy and the source for most of the horror in the film. When rabies is brought up, we focus on a fleck of foamy spit on his mouth. He endlessly corrects the girl and pedantically explains references that she makes, coming off like an insecure internet troll, defending a balloon-skin-thin ego and perhaps suffering from some slight autism (he shows and aversion to touch.) He is grunting, fat, and ogre-ish and sullenly shouts at his fragile mother. He's pathetic and abominable. A great villain!
The film was really interesting. It's kind of dream-like and eerie. Very evocative and fascinating. It's not the sort of film you can "solve" exactly so be ware. You never get the solutions to all of the questions (or at any rate I didn't) and that's OK (like the setting of the film, or the musical they keep referencing: Oklahoma.) The film is full of interesting twinning and imagery however and is a rich source for speculation. Are we watching is boy's memories or fantasies about a relationship that never was, or are we seeing an amalgamation of all the previous girls he's known? I have my theories (see above) but yours will be different.
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