Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an eerie and haunting meditation on mortality, missed opportunities, and the passage of time – all wrapped up in a dissection of narcissistic masculinity’s inability to let go of the past. The film features a male character that, in previous Kaufman films, would have been where all our sympathies lie. However, the film is structured in such a way that our entry and point-of-view lies almost entirely with the young woman who would normally only exist as the object of this character’s romantic obsession. This gives us a much more honest vantage from which to observe the controlling obsessiveness in so much of toxic male behavior, and it manages to show the consequences for this behavior on others – even as we question what is real and what is delusion. While so many of Kaufman’s films are filled with a kind of wistful melancholy that allows you to look fondly on the characters and their existential crises, here, the use of the slowly drifting camera, the restrictive Academy ratio, and the jarring edits all combine to keep us off-killer, expecting horror or terror to seep into the frame at any moment. It’s an uncomfortable, difficult film that invites us to return for a further interrogation of its narrative and its mysteries, while simultaneously encouraging us to interrogate the self-deceptions we live with each and every day.