I’m Thinking of Ending Things begins normally enough. As the film opens, Jessie Buckley plays a young woman on a date with Jake a guy she has been seeing for a few weeks. But, as her interior monologue informs us, she wants out. Or at least she thinks she does. Jake is nice and all, but he’s not really right. Or is he? She is, after all, on her way with him to meet his parents. That’s got to mean something, right? But her discomfort with their relationship soon spills out into the audience. As Jake drives her through a snowstorm to get to the farm where his parents live, their conversations — touching on everything from physics to movies to poetry to Broadway (Jake has a special place in his heart for “Oklahoma!”) — feel oddly scripted, as if they’re parroting grad-school assertions that they think are what two intellectual people would say to each other in similar circumstances. There’s a palpable artificiality. Are they living their lives or those of others? Of course, seeing as the