How Scary Is I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the New Charlie Kaufman Movie? – Slate

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Netflix.

For diehards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Maybe youve even lost whole nights of sleep in a struggle to get certain images or ideas out of your head.

Never fear, scaredies, because Slates Scaredy Scale is here to help. Weve put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same thingssome viewers cant stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or simply cant stomach arterial spurtsit breaks down each movies scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore. This time: Im Thinking of Ending Things, screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufmans adaptation of the 2016 novel by Iain Reid about a young woman meeting her boyfriends family for the first time.

Im Thinking of Ending Things aims for existential dread more than terror, and although there are plenty of uncanny and unsettling scenes, you probably wont find yourself clutching your armrest. Theres one abrupt cut toward the end that might be startling, and the finale has a creepy sequence in which one character searches a deserted high school for another, but if you can make it through the trailer, you wont have much of a problem watching the movie. Unless you are terrified by your own mortality and the long, slow physical decline that presages it and find that lately, whenever you catch a glimpse in the mirror at the wrack and ruin that used to be your face, you cant help wondering if its too late to ever have the life you wanted, the life you dreamed of, the life you always knew was just around the corner, but now, but now, alas in which case this movie will scare you to death, or at least inspire you to sign up for an adult education class.

Im Thinking of Ending Things is more about the passage of time than ghosts or monsters, but its pretty blunt about the passage of time. You wont find yourself dreading showers or scanning the horizon for fins at the beach, but you might find yourself wondering if existence itself is kind of a raw deal. How much that will haunt you after seeing Im Thinking of Ending Things depends on how much it haunts you already!

Im Thinking of Ending Things is not a gory movie. There is one shot featuring the bodies of two dead sheep, but theyre frozen solid, not bloody or decomposing; theres also an unsettling story about pigs and maggots, but it isnt shown on screen. Theres one mildly gross shot of a toe missing its nail, but theres really very little to worry about, gore-wise.

The thing about existential dread is that if you pack enough of it into a movie, you can end up with something pretty frightening even without werewolves or vampires. Im Thinking of Ending Things wont make you scream or cover your eyes, but it takes a relatively dim view of life in ways that might stick with you afterward. Its not the kind of movie youll regret having seen the next time youre alone in an empty house, but if youre prone to sleepless nights wondering where your life went wrongespecially if youre a high school janitormaybe steer clear.

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How Scary Is I'm Thinking of Ending Things, the New Charlie Kaufman Movie? - Slate

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero