Mark Reviews Movies: THE KINDRED (2022)

The Kindred, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 6, 2022

The Kindred begins with some promise—and a couple of shocks. The first two shocks arrive almost immediately, as a woman runs out of an apartment building, only to be in the perfect spot to get a close-up view of a person falling from a considerable height and crashing into the pavement. In her horrified state, the woman doesn't notice the bright lights approaching her at speed, and the violent thud of her body against a car accounts for the other shock.

Screenwriter Christian J. Hearn gives us a fairly effective and cruelly efficient—if a bit ridiculous—opening scene, and it's followed by Helen (April Pearson), the woman with terrible timing (great timing, though, if we're talking about the punctuation of a scene), awakening in a hospital bed. Everything seems as normal as can be—for someone having experienced the psychological trauma of witnessing that death and the physical punishment of being hit by a car, obviously.

That's when her husband Greg (Blake Harrison) arrives with one final shock to Helen's system and the setup of this story. Helen has been in a coma for a year. Also, she gave birth to the couple's daughter while in that coma, so on top of everything else, she's now a mother to a baby girl who has only known her father. Could things become worse for poor Helen?

This, of course, is a dumb question to ask under the circumstances. Considering how much Hearn and director Jamie Patterson throw at Helen—and, by extension, us—within the first five minutes of this movie, one does wonder just how bad things will become for our beaten, confounded, and ill-prepared protagonist. Given how the setup is also about trauma and grief and feeling like a stranger in one's own life, we're not quite prepared for how dumb and routine the resulting circumstances end up being.

See, the man who died in the fall was Helen's father (played by Jimmy Yuill). On account of her coma or the trauma or any of the other possible explanations, she cannot remember what her final conversation with him—the one that ultimately resulted in his suicide—was. That's the mystery she wants to solve, and she has to do so while living in her dead father's apartment (Greg couldn't afford to keep their house while Helen was in the coma). Meanwhile, Helen also has to learn how to be a mother to a baby who cries and fusses every time her own mother comes near her.

All of this is fine—intriguing and with tinges of melancholy, uncertainty, and dread, even. Pearson's performance gives us a sense of aching frustration and despair to go along with Helen's comprehensible and genuinely unsettling predicaments.

Then, the ghosts start appearing. It's not that the introduction of a supernatural element to this story is inherently a bad idea or a wrong direction. The problem is that Hearn and Patterson do very little with it in terms of examining Helen's mental state, the grief she's experiencing over the death of her father, or the guilt she possesses in feeling like a failure as a mother. The ghosts are ghosts here, wandering the halls to give Helen a startle, grabbing at her leg to give her a fright, and screaming with bloodied faces at the camera in an attempt to make volume compensate for the lack of anything new or scary.

The rest of this plays out almost exactly as anyone would anticipate. Helen notes that the phantoms are children, learns about a series of missing children from decades ago, and contacts a psychic (played by Steve Oram) to give her—and, by extension, us again—the rundown of the movie's mythology and rules about these ghosts. There are more scares, a series of failed attempts to get concrete answers from people—including the detective (played by Robbie Gee) putting the final touches on the case of the suicide and a retired detective (played by Samantha Bond) who investigated the missing children—about what's happening, and more and more cheap, predictable attempts to frighten us with old and not-at-all reliable tactics.

The solution to the mystery here is pretty apparent, even with a last-minute twist, which simply shifts one part of the answer to the second-most obvious suspect. All of this is to be expected once The Kindred establishes exactly what it's doing and how it's playing its game, but for a brief moment at the start and in intermittent moments throughout, the movie gives us some sense of the unexpected. It's a shame, then, that feeling doesn't last.

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