Charlie Kaufman has a well-earned reputation for incredibly hard to understand films. This one is actually not as difficult to understand as I had feared but it still has its surreal and abstract moments. Unfortunately it is largely a retread of Kaufman’s usual themes, which as one Broken Forum poster puts it is about a self-loathing old man with a girl who wishes she were elsewhere. This plays even worse nowadays and comes across essentially as an incel’s lament.

A young woman is on a road trip with her new boyfriend Jake to visit his parent’s farmhouse in the countryside. But even as she engages in conversation with Jake in the car, her inner thoughts are turned towards breaking up with him as she feels that she barely knows him and their relationship is nothing special. As they talk about a variety of high-brow topics including Jake getting her to recite a morbid poem equating returning home with stagnation and death, the audience notices an odd phenomenon. The name that Jake addresses her by keeps changing, as do details of what she does, ranging from biology to physics to painting. Eventually they make it to the farmhouse but the encounter with Jake’s parents is an exceedingly awkward one as they behave so oddly. Reality seems to break down over the course of the evening as the characterizations of the parents shift from moment to moment. Interspersed through all this are shots of a old man working as a janitor in a high school.

This one definitely has horror movie vibes and I believe that’s from the original novel it was based on as well. The imagery is consistently creepy and the farmhouse seems full of dark secrets. Jake himself comes across as the stereotypical nice guy, too eager to show himself as a dependable and caring boyfriend. Perhaps the shots of the school janitor were meant to be confusing but I guessed early on what was really going on with all of the shifting details so I don’ think it’s much of a spoiler at all. This all takes place within the imagination of the lonely janitor and the girlfriend doesn’t exist except as a pastiche of various fantasies and dreams. Effectively the whole film is telling you that he looks like a depressing, unassuming old man from the outside. But if only you took the time to get to know him better you would realize the richness of his inner thoughts, that he can debate philosophy, enjoy poetry, and engage in sophisticated film criticism like the artsiest of intellectuals. But no one ever gave him a chance so life and happiness has passed him by.

I believe that this truly is the film’s point but it’s extremely annoying because it pulls a bait and switch on the audience. The film pretends that it’s from the perspective of the woman and deliberately includes lines that suggest sympathy for women being constantly dogged by men. Yet this is a superficial veneer at best and at its heart this film is like all of the other Kaufman films. It’s about men who are unable to truly understand or connect with women yet still long for female company and feel incomplete without them. Not only does it feel like a tired theme, but it’s especially icky here because it feels like the male character is actively trying all kinds of things, saying all the right words, affecting the right attitude and interest in all the right topics, just to convince the woman that he’s not a creep. As a piece of art, what’s worse is that you can see Kaufman being pulled in both directions. He does know that the man looks like an evil creep and plays it up with the horror movie aesthetics. Yet he also wants the audience to sympathize with him and acknowledge his pain. In the meantime, the woman is revealed to be no one at all, just an imaginary fantasy stand-in. It’s like the man is saying he just wants a woman of his own, exactly as he puts it in the lyrics of the song from the musical Oklahoma! and doesn’t even particularly care who she is as a person.

I do continue to like Kaufman’s earlier films because male alienation from women is a legitimate theme and works like Synecdoche, New York highlight this in a more sophisticated way on top of other themes. This film however has nothing except this lament and it is very blunt in its application. As such I’d call this a miss and can’t recommend it at all. Kaufman is a talented artist but if he wants people to have more sympathy for lonely men, he’s going about it the wrong way.