I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Full of misgivings, a young woman travels with her new boyfriend to his parents’ secluded farm. As the visit unfolds, unsettling inconsistencies and surreal events cause her to question her relationship, her identity, and the reality around her. The film gradually shifts from an awkward road trip drama into a haunting psychological mystery.
Narrative Score
Full Plot & Ending Explained
Intro
A young woman, variably identified as Lucy, Louise, or simply the girlfriend, rides with her boyfriend Jake through a snowstorm to meet his parents at their remote farmhouse, already thinking about ending the relationship because she feels uneasy about him and about the relationship itself.
Turning Point 1
During the long drive, the couple talk in fragments about poetry, physics, memory, and loneliness; Jake asks her to recite a poem, and she responds with a bleak original poem that hints at death and dissatisfaction. When they finally arrive, Jake takes her to the barn first, where he tells a grotesque story about pigs being eaten alive by maggots, immediately making the trip feel eerie and unstable.
Turning Point 2
Inside the farmhouse, Jake’s parents, Irene and Donald, behave warmly at first but quickly become unsettlingly strange. At dinner, the girlfriend’s story about how she met Jake keeps shifting, she notices a childhood photo of Jake that seems to resemble her, and phone calls from a mysterious male voice interrupt the evening, including the ominous instruction that there is “one question to answer.”
Turning Point 3
As the night deepens, the house becomes more surreal: Jake’s parents appear younger and older in impossible ways, the girlfriend finds janitor uniforms in the basement laundry, and she discovers posters for Ralph Albert Blakelock exhibitions featuring paintings that look like her own work. These details suggest that her identity, her art, and even the entire visit may be projections tied to Jake’s memory and obsession.
Turning Point 4
On the drive to a Dairy Queen, the girlfriend recognizes the teenage cashier as someone she cannot quite place, and after Jake stops at a deserted high school to throw away trash, he suddenly kisses her in the car. He then seems to relive a memory of the janitor watching them from the school, becomes furious, and leaves her alone in the car before going inside the building.
Turning Point 5
The girlfriend searches the school in confusion and fear, gets lost in its corridors, and begins to experience fragments of someone else’s life: a traumatic childhood with a controlling mother, an intrusive “neighbor,” and a sense of being watched and taken away. The film increasingly collapses into Jake’s inner world, revealing that the girl’s experiences are not stable reality but layered memories, fantasies, and regrets.
Ending
In the final revelation, the “girlfriend” is exposed as an idealized, composite figure from Jake’s imagination, and the janitor is revealed to be an older, lonely Jake who has spent his life trapped in regret, unrealized ambition, and fantasy. He returns to the high school, imagines an awards-style life he never truly lived, then kills himself, while the story ends with the film’s title resolving as Jake’s final wish to end things.
Cross-checked against Wikipedia and other public film references. View on Letterboxd ↗ The Narrative Score above is an experimental 5-axis rating, not a critic score.