Charlie Kaufman toys with time, love, and memory in the eerie I'm Thinking Of Ending Things trailer

Charlie Kaufman toys with time, love, and memory in the eerie I'm Thinking Of Ending Things trailer
I’m Thinking Of Ending Things Photo: Mary Cybulski

Hot on the heels of Charlie Kaufman’s sprawling debut novel, Antkind, comes the latest film from the daring filmmaker, whose Anomalisa and Synecdoche, New York remain some of this century’s most beguiling films. I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is an adaptation of Ian Reid’s 2016 novel, a disquieting chronicle of a young woman’s trip to meet the parents of her new boyfriend in a snowstorm.

It’s a simple premise, which gives the story the freedom to branch off into a number of odd emotional and metaphysical directions. And, per a recent preview in Entertainment Weekly, Kaufman is taking it into even stranger territory while maintaining the themes that make Reid’s book so potent. “Loneliness and hopelessness and regret—these are things that are part of the fabric of this film,” Kaufman said. (A press release, meanwhile, teases the film as being “inspired by” Reid’s novel.)

You can sense Kaufman’s pet themes in the first trailer for the movie, which exudes an eerie, offbeat tone as it teases a fluid and flexible sense of time and place. Based on this first glimpse, the audience is likely to be as unmoored as Jessie Buckley’s protagonist, haunted as she is by the title phrase.

Jesse Plemons, David Thewlis, Toni Collette, and one very wet dog round out the cast of the mind-bender, which is slated to hit Netflix on September 4.

 
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