Synopsis

Despite second thoughts about their relationship, a young woman (Jessie Buckley) takes a road trip with her new boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to his family farm. Trapped at the farm during a snowstorm with Jake’s mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis), the young woman begins to question the nature of everything she knew, or thought she did, about her boyfriend, herself and the world.

The Good

This key quartet of performers here are all pro’s pros. Each one, as per usual, are dead on their games.

The Bad

Where to start?

Blah Blah begets Blah…

Cinema as dream can be dreamy. Or it can be the life flashing before your eyes stage play on film (if you can call a plodding 2 hours and 14 minutes instantaneous) “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”. Which is to say, a nightmare of nothingness.

Oh sure, there were the genre-requisite rants and ramblings on life, the meaning of it, the loss of it (both naturally and self-inflicted), the damage done by domestic dysfunction, relationship restlessness and eating ice cream in a blizzard (no, the frozen treat wasn’t DQ-dispensed).

But, hell, man.

If I want to be depressed, discouraged, disillusioned and dejected to damn near hopelessness I’ll just switch on C-SPAN for chrissake.

And let us not kill these messengers…

Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, David Thewlis and personal fave, the sublime Toni Collette, do all they can to make this exercise in voluminous vacuousness bearable. Alas, bless their cumulative gifted and game hearts, the cause is lost almost literally from the get-go.