I’m Thinking of Ending Things ending explained

Based on the novel of the same name by Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things premiered on Netflix this month. The film features an all-star cast, including Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, and David Thewlis. If you’ve already watched the film, you know that it’s more than a little unsettling.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is packed full of important moments and bits of dialogue that you might miss if you aren’t giving the film your full attention. Even if you thought you had a firm grip on the plot one minute, it was gone the next, with time and characters shifting like snowflakes in a blizzard.

The film is about identity, fantasy, loneliness, and frankly, it has more to do with the musical Oklahoma! than I expected it would. If the movie’s final minutes left you confused, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to examine the conclusion of the new movie.

What is I’m Thinking of Ending Things about?

The main character is a woman (Jessie Buckley) who is on her way to meet her new boyfriend Jake’s (Jesse Plemons) parents. The woman, who is referred to throughout the film by different names, is considering ending their relationship even as they drive through a snowstorm to Jake’s childhood home, an isolated farmhouse. The car ride there is incredibly awkward and it only gets worse when they arrive at their destination.

After giving her a creepy tour of the property featuring dead lambs and maggot-infested pigs, Jake introduces her to his parents, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. They have a dog named Jimmy who is there one minute and gone the next, and a creepy basement door.

Over the course of dinner, the main character’s profession and past continue to shift. First, she’s a quantum physicist, then a poet, a painter, and a waitress. Poetry and art she claims to be hers actually belong to established artists. While she claims at the beginning to have grown up in an apartment, she later says she was raised on a rural farmhouse like Jake.

Intercut with all of this are scenes of a janitor cleaning a high school. He is watching movies and reminiscing about things that are affecting Jake and his girlfriend in the main plot.

As dinner drags on, the protagonist grows more frantic about leaving before the weather gets too bad. In one scene, Jake’s parents are young, and in the next, they are elderly dementia patients knocking on death’s door. She receives several calls from the very names she is referred to as, but when she answers all she hears is a mysterious man’s voice. After a trip to the basement, she finds the janitor’s uniforms in the family’s washer.

Even though I was freaking out watching this go down, the main character maintains an eerie calm the entire time. She takes her ever-shifting story in stride, almost like she expects it.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things ending

The pair finally leave the farmhouse, only to end up stopping at an ice cream parlor called Tulsey Town, where two of the workers seem enamored with Jake. The third worker gives the protagonist a vague warning about not going forward in time.

After the twosome decide they don’t want their food, they drive to Jake’s old high school to throw them out. Finally, it seems that the janitor will connect to the rest of the story.

Jake notices the janitor watching them from inside the school and decides to go after him, leaving the young woman to wait in the car. After a while, she decides to go inside the school and look for him. She meets the janitor in the hallway and explains that nothing happened between her and Jake the night they met, once again telling a different version of events.

Then there’s a weird dream sequence where people dressed as Jake and the young woman engage in a ballet similar to the one in Oklahoma!. Later, the janitor leaves the school only to start having a mental breakdown in his car.

He walks naked back into the school, led by an animated pig, where an elderly-looking Jake performs on the auditorium stage. The audience, which includes Jake’s parents, the protagonist, and the Tulsey Town employees, gives him a standing ovation.

The film ends with a shot of the janitor’s car in the parking lot, with no evidence that Jake or the protagonist had ever been there.

During a phone interview with IndieWire, director Charlie Kaufman shed some light on the film’s ending. Here’s why the main character’s life seems to be built on shifting sands: she’s not real.

The protagonist is merely a figment of Jake’s imagination, a collective fantasy derived from movies and books, born from years of isolation. Jake is actually the janitor, and his parents’ ages kept shifting because he was replaying their history in his mind, trying to figure out what would have been the best time to bring a girl home.

Here is what Kaufman had to say about the meaning of I’m Thinking of Ending Things:

"This movie is dealing with somebody’s experience of absorbing things that they see and how they become part of his psyche. So this was in some ways how this person might have fantasized it out."

He continued to discuss how the protagonist fits into Jake’s mind and how it affects her character:

"She is a device, but I wanted her to be able to separate herself from that. I didn’t want it to be a twist. I felt like that would not work in a movie at this point in history. When you make a movie, everything that’s sort of ambiguous becomes concrete. You’ve got people playing these things. You can see them. I really liked the idea that even within his fantasy, he cannot have what he wants. He’s going to imagine this thing, but then he’s going to also imagine how it won’t work, how she’s going to bored with him, how she’s going to not think he’s smart enough or interesting enough."

Kaufman also explained the pit stop at the ice cream parlor.

"Then there was this idea that there were many generations of high-school kids who worked there that he had interacted with over the years and had his problems with. It’s a dreamy stop into his psyche, into his past."

Finally, here is what Kaufman said about the use of Oklahoma! in the film, especially that ballet sequence:

"There are a few things in ‘Oklahoma!’ that felt like they were really kind of thematically parallel to the story that we were telling. I was always intrigued by it, because it’s so creepy, and I liked the idea of the doppelgänger aspect in it."

Well, there you have it. The entire plot was just a story the janitor was concocting and rewriting in his mind. If you want to read even more about what was happening in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, check out the full interview with Kaufman here.