I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)'s comments

I think one of the late decoder rings in the film is a visual quote of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Kaufman wrote. That overhead shot of people and things on the ice field is telling you, if you haven't come to that conclusion yet (as there are several conclusions you might have come to instead), that this is a piece about memory. And crafted memory at that. The existential trick both the film plays is to put us in the head of the girlfriend character who is really just a shifting amalgam of different women the male character imagined himself going out with, and in a turn only possible in a Kaufman film, she is sometimes aware of her bogus existence. One of the themes at play is the idea of becoming other people through osmosis, by being around them, reading them, infecting ourselves with ideas that are not our own, and you can also take see the narrative as an exploration of that idea, even if the climax necessarily veers in another direction. The fragmentation of the male character into components that have a life of their own touches on that, but is also fueled by deep self-loathing that makes even a fictionalized "other" more palatable than the self (there are definitely shades of Adaptation in here), but a lot of Lucy says, feels or is told can actually be interpreted as Jake's internal monologue.