Film Review: Kindred

Kindred follows a young woman named Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who is planning to move to Australia with her boyfriend, Ben (Edward Holcroft), much to the dismay of his overbearing mother, Margaret (Fiona Shaw). She finds out she is pregnant, despite being on birth control. The news doesn’t make her as happy as it does for everyone else, and she has no intention of keeping it. Unfortunately, an accident leads to Ben’s death, which puts Charlotte in a more vulnerable position than ever before, especially as Margaret and her weirdly devoted stepson, Thomas (Jack Lowden), proceed to do everything they can to keep her in their English manor.

While things don’t seem all that unreasonable at first, the actions taken by Margaret and Thomas begin to take a more controlling and sinister undercurrent. Though it’s not an overtly supernatural film, Charlotte experiences a near constant presence of crows around the property, and they sometimes invade her nightmares as well. As the film goes along, we also find out the reason she never wanted to be a mother was because her own mother experiencing some kind of psychological breakdown following a severe postpartum depression, and she is worried she might suffer a similar fate.

The film is pretty engaging as a psychological thriller with minor gothic flourishes. Much of it is due to Tamara Lawrance’s wonderful performance, which really captures the anguish and frustration of her character very well. Everyone is quite good in the film. Fiona Shaw shifts between motherly and monstrous with ease. And Jack Lowden similarly does a great balance of bringing an unnerving presence with a seemingly understandable and sympathetic vibe that may or may not come in hand as Charlotte. They all know exactly the kind of film in their in, and what beats to heighten and what to keep subdued.

However, as engaging as the film is on that primal level, it ultimately leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not just that the film features the kind of moments where you want to scream at the characters  so they can do something right, but it leads to those moments at the expense of established characterization. Specifically for Charlotte’s case, she does not want to be a mother, she does not want the baby. Yet, as the film goes on, she acts in a way that leans in on those maternal instincts, and she doesn’t seem to struggle or fight against it. By the end of it, she’s just as concerned for her baby as Margaret.

Then there’s the big pay-off at the end. I won’t say what it is, but I found myself being consistently unsurprised by all of the film’s twists and turns. If you’ve seen any number of horror film, especially ones about gaslighting, it’s very easy to see what all the big setups are leading to. Predictability isn’t something I usually complain about since a formula can be used well, but Kindred doesn’t appear to say anything particularly new with it. And it doesn’t help that it ends on a deeply underwhelming note, when the filmmakers reveal what is truly going in, and the answer turning out to be the least interesting way you could possibly go about motivating a story like this.

I suppose Kindred does a fine enough approach of exploring its distinctly feminine themes from its male filmmakers. Director, Joe Marcantonio, and his co-writer, Jason McColgan, clearly know how to stage a sequence for an unsettling and emotionally harrowing effect. I was often anxious as we went from scene to scene, as Charlotte’s situation became more dire as it went along. On that level, I would say the film is a modest success. However, it ultimately left me wanting more, and not in a good way. From the lack of bringing up any potential racial component (Charlotte is Black, and Ben’s family is white) to the ending, which felt ridiculously innocuous in the grand scheme of things, there wasn’t much here that I found either enlightening or fresh. Just this year alone, The Invisible Man explored similar themes of gaslighting and female autonomy in a more enthralling fashion, and a smaller film called 1BR really caught me by surprise. The ending of Kindred is designed to be deeply upsetting, but it did little work to really evoke that on a plot and thematic level. It’s an admirable effort from Joe Marcantonio, and I hope future projects will be more fleshed out because I think he has the potential to make something really great.

 

Kindred is now out in select theaters, on VOD platforms.