“In Iain Reid's novel "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," the final section set at Jake's old high school is shorter, more claustrophobic, and more direct than the corresponding final section in the film adaptation.”

In Reid’s novel, the main character breaks down as they wander the school halls and lock themselves in a closet, at which point Reid quite graphically describes their suicide. The narrator’s claustrophobic journey through the school’s hallways ends with them dead in a closet, unable to face the world or themselves. Their death is made absolutely clear to us, as Reid describes the act in detail. Kaufman seems far more interested in exploring suicidal ideation than the act itself, so he crafts a more ambiguous ending that’s nightmarish whether the narrator kills themselves or not.

This realization that The Young Woman is merely a woman Jake saw at a bar occurs differently in the original novel. The narrator is given one of Jake's paintings by his mother, assuring her it's a portrait of her "for later." She forgets about it until she's trapped in the high school, and upon opening it, it's clear the portrait is of Jake. This is a different ending, but more explicitly says what Kaufman implies: the entire film is Jake's delusion.

In Iain Reid's novel, the final high school section spans dozens of pages detailing the narrator's disorienting wanderings through empty halls, encounters with the janitor, and culminates in a graphic suicide in a closet, creating a prolonged claustrophobic atmosphere. The film adaptation condenses this into a surreal, fantastical sequence with dream ballet and musical elements, making it less direct and more ambiguous.

But while the ending of the film is less concrete than the book's, there is an inherent bleakness, a certainty. [...] In the end, the janitor chooses his ending. The ending he perceives is not as the older janitor we see, but as Jesse Plemons in old-age makeup, performing a song from Oklahoma! and delivering a speech straight out of A Beautiful Mind as the high schoolers he felt so tortured by look on in awe. Reality is quite a bit colder.

In the book the terrified narrator comes into the school and finds the doors have been chained behind her, she runs through halls and corridors searching for Jake, finds herself in the art room where there’s red paint everywhere eventually retreating to the janitor’s room where we gradually understand that Jake, narrator and janitor are all one. The ‘janitor’ hands the ‘narrator’ a wire coat hanger which ‘she’ straightens and plunges into ‘her’ neck repeatedly and bleeds out from within a cupboard leaving the pages of the story that we have just read beside the body.

In the novel, we don’t meet the janitor until Jake and our protagonist enter the school. And when the young woman sees him at the other end of the hallway, she’s almost immediately filled with a sense of dread... In the film, however, we’re introduced to the janitor almost right from the start... These encounters culminate in a violent interpretive dance courtesy of doppelgangers. It leads to the same conclusion (ie. the death of the janitor), but the effect is entirely different.

And just as you're processing what's happening that farmhouse and freaked the hell out because you don't know where the threat is coming from, the book will move to its final act in a deserted high school.

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel... the book will move to its final act in a deserted high school.

The entirety of Iain Reid’s novel is told from the perspective of Jake’s girlfriend, who remains unnamed from beginning to end. In Kaufman’s film, she has the initial narration introduced at the beginning of the novel where she details why she wants to end the relationship, but it stops there. As Reid’s *I’m Thinking Of Ending Things* expands in the early pages, the young woman discusses the bizarre occurrence of the phone calls that Kaufman never explains.

One The Young Woman and Jake arrive at the school it becomes extremely obvious that they are the same person... The Young Woman discovers that she is a figment of Jake’s imagination. Old Jake, who is confirmed to be the Janitor in the book, appears and hands her a clothes hanger. She then stabs herself in the neck, which kills them both... The book is completely different from the point where they get to the school, and I honestly prefer that ending a lot.

Then they drive down a creepy, narrow dirt road to a huge but abandoned-looking high school (to throw out the Dairy Queen cups, as you do), where the still-unnamed girlfriend is chased around hallways by a spooky janitor. The last 50+ pages are spent following the narrator around the high school as she’s trying to elude the janitor and most of those pages sound exactly like this.

But the night is far from over, and what waits ahead is far more strange and disturbing than anything that’s happened to her so far, a collapse of reality and personhood that culminates in a final, shocking twist.

It's both a book and a suicide note; a novel within a novel "written" by the janitor to sum up his life and bid farewell to the world.

The biggest difference between the movie and book is the ending, which is where the movie and the book really compare and contrast. Kaufman believes that the ending of the book is too violent and decided to create a more ambiguous tone. The Netflix original ends with a beautiful song and dance that lets the audience come to their own conclusions. It gives the movie more of an unresolved conclusion that left me feeling more confused than comforted by this artistic change.

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the film's dual narrative weaves together scenes from Orlean's book and from Kaufman's own life,

The ending change makes the movie feel almost incomplete when compared to the novel. The title makes sense for the book; the double entendre ...

In both they drive to the school and eventually start kissing and then when jake's then jake sees the janitor watching them... truth is revealed and the only time the girl and the janitor interact is when like she hands him what he uses to kill himself and in the movie though the girl character is just kind of gone.

there's a janitor working guys bear with me there's a gender working in the school and in the end they like morph together into one person and I'm like is Jake is the janitor the janitor is Jake and she is also Jake and she was Jake the entire.

in the film however unlike in the book she interacts directly with both jake and the janitor in the school these encounters culminate in a violent interpretive dance courtesy of doppelgangers it leads to [...] slowly it becomes clear that a janitor killed himself at the high school