I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
No — I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Iain Reid's novel arrives as a snowbound riddle about a young woman, a farmhouse dinner, and a janitor who may or may not be the same man.
Consciousness Markers
Kaufman's script is densely talky, with digressions on poetry, Cassavetes, and Oklahoma!, but its didacticism is aesthetic and philosophical rather than a social-justice sermon aimed at the audience.
The film includes a brief argument over the consent politics of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' and a critical discussion of Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, but the female lead is ultimately a projection of a man's psyche rather than a vehicle for feminist messaging.
The cast is almost entirely white (Plemons, Buckley, Collette, Thewlis), with no diverse casting choices made or commented upon; the film's concerns are existential, not representational.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext anywhere in the film's narrative or its dream-logic digressions.
Race is entirely absent as a subject; the film's anxieties are about identity, memory, and mortality, not racial dynamics.
Snow, blizzards, and a closing snowplow are deployed for atmosphere and dread, not as any kind of environmentalist statement.
There is no economic critique or 'eat the rich' sentiment; the film is preoccupied with interior psychological collapse rather than class or capital.
The recurring maggot-infested pig and the rash-afflicted ice cream server are images of decay and revulsion, the opposite of any body-positive framing.
The film gestures at dementia and psychological fragmentation, but never frames these through the lens of neurodivergence as identity or advocacy.
The film engages with no historical events and makes no attempt to revise or reinterpret the historical record.
Why it received this score
Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Iain Reid's novel arrives as a snowbound riddle about a young woman, a farmhouse dinner, and a janitor who may or may not be the same man. The film is preoccupied with memory, mortality, and the slow rot of a self. Its cast is uniformly white, and the film never pauses to notice. Race does not exist here as a subject, and neither does sexuality, nor any of the identity categories a more programmatic work might feel obliged to inventory. This is not an oversight. It is a statement of appetite.
The film does permit itself a few gestures toward social consciousness. There is a parking-lot quarrel over the consent politics of "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and a long, critical detour through Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence. These are the sorts of arguments a certain kind of viewer will recognize from a certain kind of dinner party. Yet the woman at the center is not a person so much as an invention of Jake's collapsing mind, and the screenplay treats her as furniture in his psychic attic. Any feminist reading must contend with that, and the film offers no help.
The talk is relentless. Poetry, Oklahoma!, Blakelock, the anatomy of a bad relationship: Kaufman stacks allusion upon allusion with the patience of a man who has never once feared losing an audience. The lecturing, however, is aesthetic and philosophical. There is no economic grievance, no environmental alarm, no historical correction, no celebration of the body. The recurring pig, infested and rotting, and the ice cream server with her rash, are images of decay, not of self-acceptance. The result is a work that thinks hard about consciousness while declining to think about society at all. It is a cold, beautiful, exhausting object, and it knows exactly what it is.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Nothing is as it seems when a woman experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend joins him on a road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm.
Questions about I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Is I'm Thinking of Ending Things woke?
No — I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does I'm Thinking of Ending Things have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Lecture Energy at 20.
How does I'm Thinking of Ending Things compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #152 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.