FILMS

I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS His script for Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich gave Charlie Kaufman a reputation as an inspired comic mind – the most individual and outré in American cinema. He consolidated that impression with Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – but then came his own unrelentingly sombre debut feature, Synecdoche, New York, which contemplated the agonies of creation in a style that suggested Fellini brainstorming with Franz Ka›a. It was suddenly clear that effervescence wasn’t Kaufman’s natural register, and that when he was downbeat, he could be as down and deep as the best of them.

His follow-up, , co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, pushed that melancholia even further, and now takes that same sombre drift to new limits. Directed and written by Kaufman, this adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel can be found on. Nor is really “psychological horror”, as Reid’s book has been described. The film is uncategorisable: dense, uncanny and as close as cinema gets to the stuff of nightmare, in a subtle, downplayed way.