Charlie Kaufman toys with time, love, and memory in the eerie I'm Thinking Of Ending Things trailer

It’s a simple premise, which gives the story the freedom to branch off into a number of odd emotional and metaphysical directions. And, per a recent preview in Entertainment Weekly, Kaufman is taking it into even stranger territory while maintaining the themes that make Reid’s book so potent. “Loneliness and hopelessness and regret—these are things that are part of the fabric of this film,” Kaufman said. (A press release, meanwhile, teases the film as being “inspired by” Reid’s novel.)

You can sense Kaufman’s pet themes in the first trailer for the movie, which exudes an eerie, offbeat tone as it teases a fluid and flexible sense of time and place. Based on this first glimpse, the audience is likely to be as unmoored as Jessie Buckley’s protagonist, haunted as she is by the title phrase.

Jesse Plemons, David Thewlis, Toni Collette, and one very wet dog round out the cast of the mind-bender, which is slated to hit Netflix on September 4.