Charlie Kaufman
Sto pensando di finirla qui

Charlie Kaufmann's latest work, the brilliant and visionary American director, one of the most recognizable authors in world cinema, was released last year on the Netflix platform.
The film is an adaptation of the novel by Iain Reid and tells the story of a girl (Jessie Buckley) who has to go to dinner at her in-laws' for the first time.

And one thought fills her:
«I'm thinking of ending things. Once the thought arrives, it stays there. And it sticks. It persists. It dominates. There isn't much I can do, believe me, it doesn't go away. It's there whether I like it or not. It's there when I eat, when I go to bed, it's there when I sleep, it's there when I wake up, it's always there. Always. I haven't been thinking about it for long, the idea is new but at the same time it seems old. When did it start? And what if I didn't conceive it but it was implanted in my head already developed? It's an unspoken, unoriginal idea. Maybe I've always known. Maybe that's how it was supposed to end.”
"I'm thinking of ending things"
It's the refrain of this film, which echoes in the protagonist's head, reverberates in every
moment, always remains there.
However, the phrase is never spoken because the thought is closer to the truth than
an action, a thought can't be fake, a spoken sentence can.
Then, her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plumons), picks her up in the car, and as she opens the door, the inner monologue stops and finally someone speaks. It's Jake, but his voice seems to come from afar, very far away.
Then the thought returns.
"I'm thinking of ending things"
Jake hears something and says: "What?"
So the thought returns again, repeatedly, but Jake can no longer hear.
So they begin to talk, and they talk about Wordsworth, a quantum physics relation, Musicals,
Points of view, landscape, and time. Lucy recites her poem: "Dog Bones".

After the trip, in the middle of a snowstorm, Jake shows Lucy a nightmare-like farm until the moment of dinner arrives.
Inside the house, after dinner with the exhausted parents, the small oddities that accompanied the trip (perceived thoughts, voices coming from afar, paused dialogues) bloom and invade every inch of verisimilitude.


Reality and imagination completely blur, the boundaries between individuals are lost (Lucy, Louisa, Yvonne, what is the girl's name? Who will this girl ever be?) along with the normal flow of time: present, past, and future coexist within the house.

It's a continuous crescendo involving places and people, disappointments and traumas of the human mind.

Kaufmann has not decided to rest on his laurels. Evidently, many strides in his cinematic experimentation have been made since the times of the visionary but intelligible Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. We do not reach the levels of expressive freedom of a Lynch in Mulholland Drive, but the direction from the first films to this latest one seems to be that.
Kauffman is also praised for the way he directs the actors to deliver performances more over-the-top than natural. Especially the two parents, whose performance takes us into a house increasingly alienated from sensitive reality.
Thus, on a visual level, the images and setting become dreamlike as if to underline something.

I don't know if it's true, as someone claimed, that to make a good adaptation you should not choose a masterpiece, but I hope for poor Reid that it's not the case, because the adaptation in question is certainly a great piece of work.

* forgive the ignoble translated insertion of the title