I'm thinking of ending this movie early. To get the positives out of the way, the acting is great and the cinematography is good. Everything else is just awful. I'm fine with movies being allegorical, but they have to still work on a surface level. This movie is about 90 minutes of faux-psychological conversations and 30 minutes of "plot". I'm really going to try not to spoil anything, but most of the plot details will edge far too close. This movie is purposefully obtuse and works very hard to go out of its way to confuse and mislead the audience and honestly it feels like it works equally hard to bore the audience. The surface story is packed with long scenes where we get nothing but inane dialog. One character spends like seven minutes reciting a poem and later spends even longer over-analyzing an almost 50 year-old movie. If you were hoping for a movie where you have to extrapolate every line and were just watering at the mouth at the idea of deep-diving into metaphors and looking up William Wordsworth poems and anything else you see on the shelf in the background of one scene, then this movie is a buffet. I'm seeing comparisons to Hereditary (which honestly I think are just because Toni Collette is in both), but Hereditary is just a complex movie. Hereditary is a little confusing, but you can work it out with the information provided and a little determination. I'm Thinking of Ending Things expects you to make these huge leaps that really fly in the face of other things we've seen in the movie. Even after watching multiple "Explained" YouTube videos, even though I can understand what people think the movie really is about, there are far too many things that still just don't fit into place. Also, there are a few technical issues that I'm sure some people are going to say are purposeful and actually are just big metaphors for whatever, but they really don't seem like it to me. The biggest one for me is the terrible make-up. Again, keeping things as spoiler free as possible, there is a scene in a highschool auditorium where the entire audience is in the worst elderly make-up I've ever seen in a real movie by a real studio. We keep getting close-ups of one character and we can see that his hair is spray painted grey because we can see his real hair color underneath. They show us another lady in the audience and it's clear that the wrinkles on her face are drawn on in marker because they look like when people try to do Borderlands cosplay and have to make themselves look cell-shaded. Our female lead goes on a prolonged rant and I started to notice an accent that was never there before and never was again. Is it supposed to be symbolic and purposeful, or did the Irish actress just slip into her natural voice and they didn't want to re-shoot a scene where she rants for seven straight minutes? Toni Collette is an amazing actress, so I know she's playing her character exactly how she is supposed to, so whatever she's is doing is what she's told to do, but it doesn't make any sense to have her wildly overact everything to the point where is becomes almost a caricature of an over-dramatic high school play. It's really hard not to put spoilers in here, but even after you understand what the movie is trying to do, there are still so many things that I chalk up to error and arrogance that I'm sure defenders will say are done on purpose because the very nature of the story isn't supposed to make sense. In my opinion, this movie is two hours of masturbatory levels of pretentiousness that is supposed to confuse you. Kaufman wants you to have no idea what is going on. This isn't like a Christopher Nolan movie where people just aren't used to having to pay this level of attention to what's going on to understand, this movie is a 1,000 pieces puzzle that has printing on both sides, but for each side, the pieces fit together differently than the other side and sometimes you have to throw away a couple of pieces and draw your own on little bits of cardboard and cut them out to finish the puzzle and even though you've got a 1,000 piece puzzle completed in front of you, there are still 300 pieces in the box that you are pretty sure go to a completely different puzzle, but KaufmanFan6969 says that you are an idiot and those pieces are supposed to intersect the exiting puzzle on the y-axis and you are just too damn stupid to have figure that out, even though there is no opening for these pieces to go through and it's a puzzle of a giraffe and these left over pieces are tie-dye and and you're pretty sure that a couple of them are from a Digimon puzzle your grandma got you for your 12th birthday because she didn't quite understand what Pokemon is. I'm all for having to unpack a movie and work through some stuff to get to the chocolaty, nougaty center, but not if I need 2x4's, a jar of mayonnaise, and 14 purple index cards to get there and I'm not even sure the center is edible.