2020 isn't over yet, but I believe I Want to End It All can be considered a very different film throughout the year.
Although the film may seem lengthy, trivial, dull, and confusing, when you almost understand what the film is really shooting, you are bound to feel its anxiety, loneliness, pain, and horror, which I tend to call the "staying power" of the film.
Yes, I have to admit that this movie is really powerful, big enough to make many single young people living alone feel frightened. The life of an ordinary person can be shown in such a special perspective in 2 hours and 14 minutes, and aging is so powerless that the regrets and pains that are tightly hidden in this life will be naked. On the surface, it is a dull literary film, but in fact, it is a realistic horror film.
The beginning of the whole story is an ordinary plot that can no longer be ordinary, the men and women who have been dating for more than a month drive themselves, and the end is the boy's hometown on the country farm, and the girl visits her boyfriend's parents for the first time.
During the trip, girls will always have the idea of breaking up with their boyfriends, but the communication between the two people in the car is still very compatible, because the girl thinks that her boyfriend is a smart, willing to listen and learn boy, they can talk a lot of content, literature, movies, academics, so it will give people an illusion, this couple is actually good to get along.
When we arrived at the boy's house, the whole plot became strange. Strange father and mother, the boy became extremely gloomy, four people sat around to eat, did not eat much, all chat dialogue, mother's not very funny jokes, father's lack of understanding of art...
What's even more bizarre is that the camera turns, the boyfriend's father has quickly aged into an old man with Alzheimer's disease, the mother is weakly slumped in a chair, and the boyfriend is feeding her. At this point, the film has fully entered a "surreal" state, and the girl seems not to come to this home for the first time, but to come over and over again, and even seems to be trapped in the process.
Later, on the way back, the boy suddenly decided to go to an ice cream shop, bought ice cream, and then temporarily decided to go to his own high school and throw away the ice cream... Throughout the process, we can feel the boy's paranoia, irritability, gloom, and some narcissism, but we also have to admit that he does have some advantages.
But as the movie continues, none of this matters, because the story doesn't exist, the couple doesn't exist, and everything comes from fantasy.
The truth is that the single old man who works as a cleaner in high school fantasizes about this plot with comfort, which is full of regret and subconscious projection of his life.
It is also because all this comes from fantasy, so the movie inevitably looks fragmentary and chaotic, lacking logic, in the process of male and female dialogue, there will suddenly be a shot of an old man cleaning the campus, there will suddenly appear tv drama shots, because all things come from the memory of the fragmentary reality of the patchwork. But I don't think the film is willful, although it has obvious directorial overtones.
The most important quality of this film is "overlap", which overlaps with itself, and overlaps with memories, desires, experiences, and various details of life.
The male protagonist is an overlap, he is born on a farm, his parents are ordinary, but he is self-motivated, intellectually curious, and has his own understanding and cognition of literature, film, academia, and art;
The heroine is an overlap, and what she overlaps is the old man's desire for the opposite sex, the desire to communicate with the opposite sex who has common hobbies;
The heroine's going to the male protagonist's home is also a kind of overlap, the overlap may be the old man's past experience, he may have had a girlfriend when he was young, and the girlfriend also came to the home, but they did not come together in the end, perhaps this is also the eternal regret in the heart of the old man;
Parental aging is also overlapping, overlapping the resentment and love of the elderly for their parents, a complex emotion;
There is also overlap in the ice cream parlor, and perhaps the overlap is the evil desire of the old man, and I even guess that in this desire, he hurt some girls...
A person is not just a person, he is both reality and consciousness, experience, time, loneliness, desire, regret, yearning, pain, reason, beast, strong desire for good things, and fragile flesh skin.
The horror of cinema is that, in a way, it's a lot like a prophecy, especially in this day and age, where people are getting more educated, but the problem of living alone and the aging of the population remain unsolved.
Ask yourself, who doesn't crave good things, smart and beautiful lovers, remarkable achievements, who don't want to be happy people, successful people, decent people, dignified people, even if they take ten thousand steps back, I believe most people are willing to be ordinary but happy ordinary people.
But reality is often harsh, and there's always a way we can't be who we want to be. When you desire the opposite sex, you may remain single; when you desire to be single, you may enter the family life; when you desire to achieve something, you may remain obscure; when you desire to get rich, you may always be poor...
Perhaps, we always run counter to our ideals, and no matter what our hearts are, whether we are a good person or not, whether we have a good taste for literature and art, it does not prevent us from becoming inconspicuous people, small people, neglected people, never getting what we want, neither choosing birth nor going well, until we grow older, physically old, and called by death.
"I Want to End It All" is a film that reveals such a cruel possibility, so that people who watch the movie can't help but be disappointed and afraid, which is simply a bit "anti-human".
At the end of the movie, the old man walks naked into the winter night, and it is very much like a way of "cruel response to cruelty", standing on the opposite side of "don't walk gently into that good night", straight, I want to end all this, including the few lives left.