The Ending Of I'm Thinking Of Ending Things Explained

Whenever you watch a Charlie Kaufman film, you know to expect the unexpected. Whether he is giving us a little door that leads into the head of John Malkovich or an entire city built to be the backdrop of a play, Kaufman has a unique imagination. However, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" might be the most head-scratching of Kaufman's filmography. In fact, it may well earn a spot among the hardest-to-follow movies of all time. (Though, that didn't seem to stop this relationship thriller from killing it on Netflix when it first came out.)

Well, have no fear. If you were confused by the ending, we might be able to answer some of your questions, such as why the young woman's name keeps changing and why her boyfriend's parents undergo such startling transformations. There's even a perfectly logical explanation for the musical number. Don't believe us? Read on for the answers.

"I'm Thinking of Ending Things" follows a young woman (Jessie Buckley) and her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) as Jake introduces her to his parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, the latter of whom may look familiar to "Harry Potter" fans). We don't know the girlfriend's real name — Buckley is only credited as "young woman," and Jake calls his girlfriend a different name each time. But for the sake of simplicity, we'll call her Lucy. Lucy feels like her relationship with Jake has lost its spark, and she is waiting for the right moment to tell him that she wants to end things. What follows is an awkward dinner with Jake's overbearing parents, who keep insisting that Lucy stay the night. Instead, Lucy keeps saying she needs to leave.

However, something isn't quite right. For one, Lucy and Jake give conflicting stories of how they met. Meanwhile, Jake's parents transform in bizarre ways, looking middle-aged at one moment and then old and frail the next. Strangest of all, Jake and Lucy's story is randomly intercut with scenes of a high school janitor (Guy Boyd).

Eventually, Jake agrees to take Lucy home. But along the way, he persuades Lucy to stop and get ice cream in the middle of a blizzard. Afterward, Jake insists that he needs to throw away the ice cream cups, so despite Lucy's protests, he stops at his old high school to dispose of them.

Suddenly, Jake becomes paranoid that somebody in the school is spying on them while they kiss (even though Lucy doesn't see anyone). Jake barges into the school, hoping to confront the "pervert." Reluctantly, Lucy follows him, but Jake is nowhere to be found. All she sees is an old man in a janitor uniform, the same janitor we've seen throughout the movie. Lucy asks the janitor if he has seen her boyfriend, but she has difficulty remembering what Jake even looks like. Perhaps his face is so hazy, she wonders, because he was never really her boyfriend — just a creepy old guy who smiled at her in a bar, and she never saw him again. Lucy and the janitor exchange an uncomfortably long hug, and then Lucy leaves.

After this, the movie gets a little trippy. First we see two dancers dressed like Jake and Lucy perform a ballet routine in the school hallways. Afterward, the janitor locks up the school and returns to his truck, where he tears off all his clothes. Then an animated talking pig (Oliver Platt) leads the janitor away, presumably to his death. Meanwhile, we glimpse Jake giving an acceptance speech for an award while his girlfriend and parents watch. Then he performs a song from the musical "Oklahoma" on a stage designed to look like his childhood bedroom. In its final shot, the film cuts back to the janitor's truck, buried in snow. There is no sign that Jake and Lucy were ever there at all.

If you're wondering how much of the movie is real, the answer is almost none of it. That's right, Charlie Kaufman played the "it was all just a dream" card (just like these TV shows). Almost everything we see in the movie — except for the glimpses of the lonely old janitor mopping school hallways and watching romcoms — exists only in the main character's head. And contrary to what you might think, Lucy is not the main character. It's the janitor — and the janitor and Jake are actually the same person. All of the other characters are figments of Jake's imagination, a fantasy conjured up by a lonely old man as he sits behind the wheel of his car in a blizzard, not caring that he is freezing to death. (And this, of course, explains why the janitor strips naked; victims of hypothermia will often instinctively shed their clothes as they are dying.)

As he dies, the janitor imagines his younger self (Jake) bringing home a girlfriend to meet his parents and later showing her his old high school. Of course, this never happened in real life; Jake has likely never experienced a fulfilling romantic relationship in his life, and that is why he is dying alone. Lucy is nothing more than an "imaginary girlfriend," based on a girl that Jake glimpsed one night at a bar but never spoke to. While the scenes of Jake caring for his aging parents likely come from Jake's real memories, the entire sequence where he introduces them to his girlfriend is pure fantasy.

Director Charlie Kaufman planted plenty of small details that explain the movie's confusing ending. Once you spot them, all the weirdness from the movie makes a lot more sense. Like why Jake seems to hear Lucy's thoughts (and conveniently interrupts her each time she is about to dump him), and why Lucy looks at a photo of Jake as a child and mistakes it for a photo of herself. That's because Lucy is just an extension of Jake. As for why Lucy can't seem to remember how long she has been dating Jake — it's because she doesn't exist outside of his fantasy. If you're wondering why Jake's mother slips up and mentions Jake's 50th birthday, that's because Jake is actually much older than he appears. It also explains why Jake's parents are constantly pressuring Lucy to stay a little longer, to sleep with Jake in his childhood bedroom, to make this place her home. They are the voice of Jake's subconscious, revealing what he desperately wants Lucy to do (even though he is too embarrassed to say these things himself).

In light of this knowledge, Lucy's sinister discovery in Jake's basement makes a lot more sense. No wonder Jake doesn't want Lucy to see the washing machine full of janitor uniforms — it would have shattered the fantasy and exposed him for what he really was, a lonely old man who can only experience love by fantasizing about total strangers.

We never know the girlfriend's real name, because Jake calls her a different name each time: Lucy, Louisa, Lucia, and Ames. What's more, Jake keeps changing the story of how they met. The official story is that they first crossed paths at a bar during trivia night, yet Lucy can't seem to remember their first words to each other. Later, Jake tells his father that he met Lucy while she was waiting tables (echoing the scenario from the fake Robert Zemeckis romcom we see the janitor watching). Even Lucy's backstory changes, her occupation shifting from physicist to poet to waitress without explanation.

The reason Lucy's identity is so hazy is because she's not a real person; she is a composite of every girl that Jake has ever had a crush on. In particular, she is based on a random girl who happened to smile at him on trivia night. Since Jake has never been in a romantic relationship with anybody, he builds his fantasy around all the books and movies he consumed growing up. That's why Jake names his imaginary girlfriend "Lucy," after the subject of a William Wordsworth poem, and why the story of how the two met seems lifted straight from the romcom Jake watched. However, Jake cannot make up his mind what he wants her to be, which is why her name and backstory keep changing. He is trying — and struggling — to imagine a version of events where they could have been happy together.

Throughout the movie, we see Lucy check her phone, and each time the caller ID is a variation of Lucy's name (Lucy, Louisa, etc.) — though one time it actually displays the name Yvonne. And each time she answers, it is an old man's voice murmuring, "There's only one question to resolve." The most likely explanation is that these are the janitor's real thoughts seeping into his hallucination. It is the voice whispering in the back of his mind, telling him that he will never be loved and that it's better off if he just dies. In other words, these calls are reality threatening to barge in on Jake's fantasy.

One Reddit user proposed a fascinating theory. According to u/spinz, these calls are "the part of him that's trying to wake himself up out of this and face the choice of whether to die." (That, of course, is the "one question to resolve.") This user added that these calls are the cracks that start to form in Jake's fantasy any time he encounters something he can't explain away. For instance, if Jake has a pretty clear picture of what Lucy is like, but has trouble picturing what Lucy's friends might look like, then his mind might not be quick enough to invent what happens whenever Lucy gets a text message from her friend. Instead, his mind fills that hole with the only thing he knows: His girlfriend's name — or alternatively, Yvonne, the name of the girl from the fake Robert Zemeckis romcom.

When Jake introduces his girlfriend to his parents, his parents seem to transform before our very eyes, randomly getting older and younger. One minute, Jake's mother is hunched over in a wheelchair, unable to feed herself without Jake's help. The next, she is a much younger woman, picking up Jake's toys. If you consider that Jake is a dying old man, it's possible that his memory is failing him. If Jake has difficulty separating the past from the present, that might explain why he sees his parents (and himself) at different stages of life.

Or perhaps we see Jake's parents age on fast-forward because they are meant to embody Jake's fear of old age. Jake has presumably seen his own parents wither away and die long before he became a janitor, and he is all-too-conscious that this will happen to him, too – and may already be happening. In the car with Lucy, Jake laments the alienation of society, but his dialogue could just as easily describe the sensation of getting older, of watching your mind and body decay. "Your body is going, your hearing, your sight," says Jake. "You can't see and you're invisible, and you made so many wrong turns." It's fitting, then, that his imaginary girlfriend firmly believes the world should be more sympathetic to the elderly, because that's exactly what Jake is: elderly. No matter how hard he tries, Jake cannot escape the inevitable passage of time, not even in his fantasy.

Lucy may not be a real person, at least not in a literal sense, but that doesn't mean she is not her own character. Even though Lucy is not really the main character, director Charlie Kaufman has insisted that he wanted to give her character some agency. "She is a device, but I wanted her to be able to separate herself from that," he told Indiewire. The movie goes to great lengths to explore Lucy's inner life. It expresses Lucy's frustration at not being able to tell Jake that she wants to end things — or really assert herself much at all. She spends the whole movie going along with what Jake wants: Visiting his parents' house, getting ice cream in a blizzard, and going to Jake's old school. She is a passenger in her own life. As the film shows us, being somebody's imaginary girlfriend can be exhausting and downright terrifying.

While on one level the film works as Jake's story, it also takes on an entirely different meaning if you examine it from Lucy's perspective. The movie could also be seen as a metaphor for sacrificing your happiness and your entire identity to please your romantic partner. If you consider this alternate interpretation, then "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" takes the concept to an almost horror movie extreme. In this case, Lucy exists only to please Jake, and she is trapped in a nightmare where Jake controls her very reality.

So why are Jake and Lucy suddenly replaced by two dancers dressed to look like them? Production designer Molly Hughes told Vulture that this scene is like the janitor's life flashing for his eyes — except instead of showing his actual life, it depicts how he wishes his life had gone. Hughs explained, "The janitor is approaching his death [and experiencing] this sort of sweeping, beautiful moment of emotion or longing." The ballet is unabashedly romantic — and in fact, it's inspired by the "dream ballet" sequence from the musical "Oklahoma." That's because for such a lonely man, there is no real-life basis for this fantasy: A musical is his only frame of reference for what it's like to be loved. Speaking with Vulture, choreographer Peter Walker said, "This is a man who has never had a productive relationship in his life [and] doesn't know what that could possibly be or feel like."

However, even this fantasy is interrupted by a cold splash of reality. At first, Jake imagines himself to be the hero, identifying with the dancer who portrays his younger self. But by the end of the dance number, it becomes clear that Jake has far more in common with the jealous older man who assaults the girl and kills her boyfriend — right down to the janitor keys at his belt. Walker described this scene as "two versions of [Jake] that are fighting over this girl that doesn't even exist."

Although the final scene, in which Jake performs a song from "Oklahoma" onstage in a replica of his childhood bedroom, may seem completely random, it is actually the biggest clue to what's going on. To understand the significance of this moment, you will first need to know a little bit about "Oklahoma." The musical involves a rivalry between two men (Curly and Jud) vying for the heart of the same woman (Laurey). Jud clearly doesn't stand a chance against his handsome and charismatic rival. Jud is older, a social outcast, and not traditionally handsome; he's also a bit of a creep. When Jud sings "Lonely Room" (the same song Jake sings), Jud wallows in his loneliness, even as he allows himself to dream that maybe a girl like Laurey could love him.

In case viewers didn't pick up on it before, the ending note drives home the message that Jake is no Curly — he is a Jud. Perhaps by the end of the movie, Jake has accepted that he is not the hero of the story, but a loser who doesn't get the girl. Maybe this is the moment Jake decides to stop pretending to be something he's not. (Certainly, Jake seems to embrace his nature when the talking pig tells him, "Someone has to be a pig infested with maggots, right?") Or maybe Jake is still deluding himself right to the very end, telling himself he will "Git me a woman to call my own."

If you're wondering the real meaning behind this movie title, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" actually has two meanings. On one hand, it's referring to Lucy ending her relationship with Jake. But once you watch the janitor allow the cold to claim him, the title takes on a whole new meaning. All along, Jake was thinking of ending his own life, and as a figment of Jake's imagination, Lucy was simply voicing his thoughts. There is plenty of foreshadowing for this ending, if you consider the way Jake's conversation keeps drifting back to the idea of suicide, whether discussing the death of David Foster Wallace or ants that kill themselves for the good of the colony.

But why does Jake want to kill himself? Charlie Kaufman offers some insight into this, telling Indiewire, "I really liked the idea that even within his fantasy, he cannot have what he wants." No matter how hard he tries, Jake cannot imagine a scenario where he and Lucy could be happy together. Not even his imaginary girlfriend wants to be with him. It is almost like Jake's subconscious mind is sabotaging his own fantasy, because deep down, Jake believes he doesn't deserve to be loved. So it's no wonder that Jake is in such a dark place.

Jake's suicide is yet another parallel to "Oklahoma." In the musical, Curly sings the song "Pore Jud is Daid," cruelly implying that Jud would be better off dead because folks would remember him more fondly in his absence. Perhaps Jake actually took that advice to heart.

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