I’m Thinking of Ending Things Ending Explained [SPOILER!]

SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!

A young woman (Jessie Buckley) confesses in narration that she has been thinking of ending things with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), who she has not been dating terribly long, maybe seven weeks. They are headed on a trip together to visit his parents for the first time. They leave a town and begin driving into lots and lots of farmland. She admits that maybe it’s a bad idea to go meet his family when she doesn’t think the relationship is going anywhere, but she is curious where he comes from.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I’m Thinking of Ending Things Plot Summary and Synopsis

A young woman contemplates ending her seven-week relationship with her boyfriend Jake, while on a trip to meet his parents at their farm. During the drive, Jake attempts to recite a poem he read when he was younger, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and pressures the young woman into reciting one of her poems to pass time. After she recites a morbid poem about coming home, they arrive at the farmhouse owned by Jake’s parents.

Jake takes her to the barn, where he recounts a story about how the farm’s pigs died after being eaten alive by maggots. Throughout the drive, as well as later scenes in the film, the main narrative is intercut with footage of an elderly janitor working at a high school, including scenes where he sees students rehearsing Oklahoma! and dancing in the hallway.

Upon arrival, the young woman notices scratches on the basement door. At dinner with Jake’s parents, she, whose occupation and name change throughout, shows them photographs of her landscape paintings and explains how she met Jake at a trivia night in a bar, with narrative inconsistencies. Later, she notices a picture of Jake as a child, but becomes confused after recognizing that child as herself.

She receives a call from a friend with a female name, where a mysterious male voice explains that there is “one question to answer”. Over the course of the night, Jake’s parents unexpectedly transform into their younger and older selves. When she takes a nightgown down to the basement to wash, she discovers several janitor uniforms in the washing machine and finds posters for exhibitions of Ralph Albert Blakelock paintings seemingly identical to her own.

She also receives another call from the same mysterious voice.

On the drive home, Jake claims that the young woman drank too much wine, along with other inconsistent events; word association leads to an extended critical discussion of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence.[a] They stop at Tulsey Town, a drive-through ice cream stand, whose employees are students at the janitor’s school.

While the young woman buys ice cream, an employee with a rash attempts to warn her of something she can’t describe. Jake stops at the high school to throw the ice-cream cups away. After a heated argument in the parking lot about the lyrics of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, the couple share a kiss. Suddenly, Jake notices the janitor watching them from inside the school and decides to confront him, leaving the young woman alone in the car. After a long wait, she decides to look for Jake inside the school.

She meets the janitor and asks him where Jake is, but she cannot remember what Jake looks like. She tells the janitor that nothing happened between her and Jake on the night they met, instead claiming Jake made her uncomfortable by staring at her.

After she discovers Jake at the end of a hall, they look on as people dressed like Jake, the young woman and the janitor engage in a ballet, which ends when the janitor’s dancer kills Jake’s dancer with a knife.

Having finished his shift, the janitor enters his car but does not start the motor. He experiences hallucinations of Jake’s parents and animated Tulsey Town commercials.

The janitor then takes off his clothes and walks back inside the school, led by the hallucination of a maggot-infested pig who tells him that he and his ideas are one and the same, that “someone has to be the pig infested with maggots”, and that he should get dressed.

On an auditorium stage, an old Jake receives a Nobel Prize and sings a song from Oklahoma! to an audience of people from his life, all of them in theatrical old-age makeup. They give him a standing ovation.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things Ending

In the final shot, the janitor’s car is covered in snow in the school parking lot. Towards the end of the credits, “scraping,” “clunking,” and “whirring” sounds are heard.

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).