In the 1982 comedy masterpiece Tootsie, Bill Murray co-stars as a playwright who says his ideal fan encounter is with one who says: “I saw your play. What happened?” If confounding the audience is a metric for success then Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things for Netflix can proudly hold its head high.

For those who come to the film, as I did, without reading the book, it is unlikely you will truly understand the ending, or even the central hook. We know to expect weirdness with Kaufman, whether it’s his mindscrambling script to Being John Malkovich, his exploration into the futility of artistic creation in Synecdoche, New York, or the frustrations of human connection in Anomalisa. (Recently, there’s also hilarious psychological slapstick in Antkind, a 700+ page novel that defies all descriptions.)

You’ll get a general sense of the themes Kaufman is going for in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but once you read what he’s stripped out of the story, it makes it feel a little hollow. Imagine watching The Usual Suspects but without the shot of Chazz Palminteri recognising all the names and places on the bulletin board behind him.

So let’s take a long drive through snowy Oklahoma (without safety belts!) and talk about this weird move. This is a safe space to admit we got confused.

What the hell is going on?

Here goes: the entire movie is a daydream inside the mind of the janitor you see periodically. The woman (or women, perhaps more accurately) that Jessie Buckley plays is a fantasy. The man Jesse Plemons plays, Jake, is a projection of the janitor decades earlier. (Even though they have iPhones in the vision; that’s the least of the confusing bits.)

You can kinda-sorta intuit that there is a connection between the janitor and what’s happening at the time-shifting farmhouse with William Morris print wallpaper (his clothes are in the washing machine), but having the movie told, with voiceover, from the perspective of Buckley’s character, only to actually be from the mind of the janitor is a leap my puny mind never made. Maybe yours did.

Here’s more: the entire purpose of the daydream is because the janitor is contemplating killing himself. Before he can decide, he’s trying to imaging “other roads taken.” In the book, the story about the trivia night is true. Buckley’s character smiled at Jake, but in reality Jake lacked the nerve to speak to her. So the “meet the parents” scenario not only never happened, but he didn’t know anything about Buckley’s character other than she was cute, hence the changes in names, occupations and attitudes.

There are some very small breadcrumbs to suggest this. When Buckley’s character meets the janitor and says she can barely remember meeting Jake, that he’s a mosquito from 40 years ago, this is reflective of reality. But who’s to know this? A few scenes earlier, she was channelling the spirit of Pauline Kael (we’ll get to that) and later Jake is going to channel Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind and Jud from the musical Oklahoma!

I’m Thinking of Ending Things being told from inside the Buckley character’s head and not Jake’s makes this pretty difficult to suss out. So if you didn’t get this, don’t feel too bad.

Does not understanding the whole point of the movie make it bad?

In this case, no. I found myself riveted throughout I’m Thinking of Ending Things. All of the performances (also including Toni Collette and David Thewlis) are terrific, and maintaining a tone of edgy nervousness for over two hours takes some heavy duty shooting and editing worthy of huzzahs. Buckley’s performance, thanks in part to all the shifting her character does, is certainly the most showy, which is funny since there’s the whole monologue, taken from film critic Pauline Kael, condemning Gena Rowlands’s (mostly) treasured similar feat in John Cassavetes’s film A Woman Under the Influence.

Why did she become a film critic in the middle of the movie? And was that poem hers?

Something that isn’t in the book is a moment that is actually quite reminiscent of the aforementioned Usual Suspects gag. Since the janitor doesn’t really know anything about the Buckley character, he fills her up (and his younger self, too) with whatever was laying around his bookshelf. So that’s a collection of Kael’s film reviews, some of Eva H.D.’s poems, paintings by Ralph Albert Blakelock, the novel Ice, a Wordsworth volume, physics texts, and a DVD of A Beautiful Mind. The musical Oklahoma! is in the air since he’s at a high school in Oklahoma that frequently puts on the show. (Typical of Kaufman to include a song that was cut from the movie version, leaving many of us to wonder: “Wait, is this from Oklahoma!? I don’t remember it too well.”)

The collection of David Foster Wallace essays and the subsequent discussion of suicide is there to help the narrative segue from the suggestion that the film’s title isn’t about the end of a bad relationship, but a person’s life.

There are so many stray lines that later become foreshadowing (a Bible quote later visualised in a ballet dream sequence) or that act as commentary on what Kaufman is doing. Blakelock’s paintings are described as evoking sadness, even though they are not explicitly sad. The same can be said for nearly every scene in this movie.

Of course, all this tricky stuff isn’t the end-all-be-all of the movie. What it effectively expresses is the unease some people feel in a new relationship to fit expectations with that person’s family. It’s gaslighting to the nth degree, and extremely uncomfortable to watch.

Why the diss against Robert Zemeckis?

The “directed by Robert Zemeckis” title card from the corny film-within-a-film, according to Netflix began as a placeholder from an assistant editor. Kaufman thought it was hilarious, asked Zemeckis’s permission and the rest is history.

As it happens, the long-in-development film Chaos Walking, based on Patrick Ness’s book The Knife of Never Letting Go, was once adapted by Kaufman. His name remains as one of the six writers on the version shot but not yet released by Doug Liman. But in 2012, Robert Zemeckis was supposed to direct. Whether the snarky inclusion is a comment on this project will stay forever buried deep in Kaufman’s mind.