Kindred

I'm sorry. We did everything we could. The funeral's tomorrow. I should go home and rest. It's the doctor's orders. How are you feeling? Hypnause. I was the same as Benjamin. I'm gonna need some of my things. I sent Thomas over yesterday. Everything you want will be in your wardrobe. How is the baby? I'm feeling dizzy. I'll get you some water. Maybe you should see another doctor. Don't worry, everything's under control. What are you doing? You're not well. You don't even seem to realise that. You conditioned. Give me the key. I think I'm gonna give me. Hello, Sydney. It's your killer host! My name is Parker, your resident horror fanatic, and welcome to my favorite scary movie.

What's your favorite scary movie is a horror film podcast where we're on a journey to find our favorite scary movie one at a time. Whether you hate them or love them, join us and discover yours. Greetings, listeners. Again, it is just me and just you, one of my favorite people in the entire world. How have you been? I'm so excited to spend a couple of minutes with you talking a new horror movie that I'm very excited about. Now, I want to try something new this week. I want to try starting with a spoiler-free review for about half of the episode or the first bit, just so that if you haven't seen the movie yet, it only came out this past weekend.

You can listen to some opening thoughts and get your brain in the right headspace for it. And then I'll let you know, plenty of warning. I'll go into spoilers in the second half of the episode, so that if you have seen the movie, you can dig a little deeper with me. So today we're watching Kendred, a brand new horror movie that I just as I just said came out this past weekend, um, the first weekend of November, 2020. It was directed and co-written by Joe Marcantonio, and it is his feature debut. Congratulations, Joe, and also, excuse me, wow, way to blow us away or right out the gate, Joe. Set in the bar, hi. It was also co-written by Jason McCulgan.

Kendred stars, Tamara Lawrence, the Immaculate, Impeccable Tamara Lawrence as Charlotte. I'm so excited about her performance in this movie. The other role that she has played that struck my eyeballs on her IMDB roll sheet was a small role in the 2017 film On Chesil Beach. Now, I don't talk about this often on the podcast, but if there's one thing that I perhaps like more than horror movies, it is just a slow, over-the-top, sensational drama, gossip drama. And this movie, it is right up my alley. I read the book before it came out by Ian McEwen, who also wrote Atonement. And ladies, that movie is gossip. I love it. It is so dramatic, it is so silly, but also like makes me want to cry at the end.

That's exactly what I want when I'm not getting scared out of my britches. Kindred also stars Jack Louden as Thomas. You might recognize this man from Dunkirk in 2017 and Mary Queen of Scots from 2018. So maybe I'm just admitting that I have an obsession with Sertia Ronin, but Mary Queen of Scots didn't get a lot of love. I loved it. Beautiful. I love me a dress. I love me a costume. Gaze in that movie. He also was a producer on this film, Kindred. And to round out our trio of leads, we have Fiona Shaw playing Margaret. She, of course. We all know her as Aunt Petunia and Harry Potter. She's also been featured in Shudder's series Channel Zero and Killing Eve.

And if there's one thing I love, it is Fiona Shaw yelling at me. There's that one line in Harry Potter. I was the only one to see her for what she was. A freak. And it just lives rent-free in my brain all the time. A brief summary of this movie is Charlotte and Ben are happy. They're in love and moving away together. Then Charlotte finds out she's pregnant, then Ben dies. Taken in by her in-laws, Charlotte begins to fear for her well-being under the obsessive watch of her late husband's family. The average critic rating for Kindred is a 5.8 out of 10 as of November 4th, 2020. It may have changed by the time you're hearing this.

And at the time of recording, there is no audience rating or critics consensus because the film has not yet been released as of this recording. So I'll just have to give you my critics' consensus of Kendred. And let me tell you, the first thing I'm so excited about is the performances in this movie. As I said a moment ago, Tamara Lawrence is wonderful. She is so expressive. Her face is telling me the whole story at all times. She is able to flip on a dime the way that she is projecting emotions, sometimes tricking people around her. I love it. She also knows how to cry and scream and just, oh my god, the amount of like physical expressions of emotions from Tamara Lawrence absolutely blew me away.

I mean, I don't know that much about acting. If you're an actor and you're listening to this and you're like, well, that's her job, whatever. I don't know. I was completely enraptured with her performance. I thought that she she just encapsulated this whole premise, the whole idea of this tortured woman who's just in between a rock and a hard place. There's so much going on with her emotionally that um, you know, she doesn't want the child that she is bearing, but she's kind of trapped in a situation where she has to protect the child that she's bit carrying. I just like, ooh, it blew me away. And then on the flip side, Fiona Shaw was absolutely incredible too.

And it's this kind of demented, um aggressive, combative chemistry between them, where they're always like there are moments of sympathy for Fiona Shaw as Margaret and Thomas, where you know, they're the villains of the movie, but I felt like I understood them, and sometimes I even felt for them and was like, oh, like of course they feel this way. She just lost her son, and um I don't know what's going on with Thomas, honestly. I'll get to that later. But like I thought that the movie was incredible at building the empathy for every single character and not just Charlotte, which I think would be the easy thing to do. Ben hated you! He was desperate to get away from Erin away from you!

Please don't speak about my beautiful dead son. And again, speaking of chemistry, the chemistry between Fiona Shaw and Jack Louden is also so eerie. It's also um aggressive, but in a different way, where there's this kind of obsessive love between them, but then a resentment and an anger, and Fiona Shaw is obviously openly hostile towards Thomas sometimes, and Thomas is just always following orders and like pleading to have her approval. And I thought that as a whole, the main trio, like, there's just absolutely something fascinating about watching them. The thing that kept kind of repeating in my brain is like, holy shit, how is this happening? That's not even her family. Like, how have they done this to her?

And how can she not get out of this situation? It was kind of blowing me away. And on that note, I thought that that belt built a really beautiful tension throughout the entire movie where it's like none of this should be happening, none of it should be working, but it is, and it makes sense, and I just I really wanted her to get out, and there are moments where she gets close or where she's planning some sort of scheme, and I just had this like tickle of anxiety in my belly, and there's this kind of climactic moment at the end of the movie where I just wanted to jump out of my seat because she's so close, and I think a lot of that tension, one, is in the I thought the directing and writing by Joe Marcantonio and Jason McCulgan was really incredible, but at the same time, the performance of Tamara Lawrence, I think, is really driving the emotions and the tension of this story because of this like panic that she's building through her expressions.

I thought it was really gorgeous. And then speaking of Joe Marcantonio, I think that as a feature debut, this is really impressive. This is something that is a mark for what I'm hoping will be a wonderful slate of movies to come after this that we can look forward to from him because I thought that the way that he's framing images and the way that he's playing with characters through his writing, also Jason McCulgan, who's the co-writer, I thought that that was really spectacular. There are tropes in this movie that uh things that I've seen time and time again, but I did not feel like I was watching a rehash of Rosemary's Baby or other films that play with this like gaslight trapped in a spiral of distrust.

I didn't feel like I was watching a remake of Rosemary's Baby. I really felt a stamp of something unique on this film. Now, if you would like to avoid the spoilers, if you don't want to know what happens in Kendred, if you're dying to go see it, yes, please do because I think it'll be worth it. Leave now and watch Kindred because I'm about to give you all the gossip, all the tea on what happens in this movie. So, a more complete summary first. So basically, after Ben dies in this freak accident at work, Charlotte is trapped in the massive house that he grew up in. Charlotte's mother-in-law, Margaret, is so obsessed with Charlotte's unborn child, and these like rose-colored memories she has of Ben that we see through Ben's interactions with Charlotte aren't necessarily true to what actually happened in his relationship with Margaret.

She's so obsessed with this new child that Charlotte's about to have that she's locked all the doors and won't let Charlotte see anyone besides herself, her son Thomas, Ben's half-brother, and a doctor that seems to be in on the scheme. Uh, and they're also drugging her tea, of course. Tip why wouldn't they be? Charlotte makes many attempts to escape, but she is foiled by betrayal after betrayal, including a sonographer at the hospital and her best friend Jane. She even tries to seduce Thomas eventually. So we find out, who we find out, murdered his abusive father and cahoots with Margaret by leaving him drunk in a field to be torn apart by a field thresher. Which, you know, I would have loved footage of in this movie.

That sounds pretty spooky. In the end, it all comes down to Charlotte fooling Thomas into taking her to the doctor's office by slicing her own hand and using the blood to stage some sort of miscarriage and then stealing his car. Unfortunately, she hallucinates a murder, a murder, of crows and crashes the car. When she wakes up in the hospital, it seems all is well until the doctor won't let her see the baby, citing her family medical history of perinatal psychosis and severe postpartum depression. And the film ends with Thomas and Margaret caring for the baby at home without Charlotte. So a dark ending. I always love kind of a not a cliffhanger. I mean, I would love to know what happened after the ending scene of this movie, but a an ominous feeling of like, oh, things did not go the way that I wish they would have gone.

As I said in the spoiler-free review, there's this issue of trust and psychosis that's kind of brewing around in this movie. Um, can they trust each other in the house? Can Charlotte trust her friends outside of the house? Can we trust Charlotte as kind of, she's not the narrator of the movie, but as kind of the lead character who we're following and seeing through the eyes of. I saw on Rotten Tomatoes a uh Rotten Review by someone who said that it's another movie that just comes down to a question of is she crazy or not? And I really don't agree with that. I think that it's at least to me, I never did not trust Charlotte throughout this movie.

I think that it's clear that she is being gaslit, hoodwinked into seeming crazy. I mean, they're poisoning her fucking tea. And it's kind of a situation like Grendel, the the novel, that he's not a monster until the townspeople make him a monster. I don't think that Charlotte is crazy until she's made crazy. So maybe she is crazy at the end. She's hallucinating crows flying at her car and her husband in the seat next to her, which was a really beautiful moment that touched me. Um, but I think she's been pushed to this moment. I don't think that she has made up the way she's been treated throughout this movie. Something that really fascinated me about the end of this movie is that the way it ends is where everybody wanted to be in the first place.

Um, Charlotte did not want a child, and Margaret wanted her son. And in the end of the movie, Charlotte is the without her child, and Margaret is with a new son. And I find that really fascinating how the characters' perceptions of what they want transforms over the course of the movie. Margaret has this really lovely speech in the middle of the movie where she's talking about how she didn't want a child and how she hated being pregnant with Ben. And when he when she gave birth to him, she didn't feel love for him. She just wanted to kind of be done with the pregnancy. I wonder when he was about to feel a fool. I think that's a fool.

I don't wait. That Charlotte does not want the child, but as she's going through these traumatic experiences for the child and with the child, kind of her only ally in it, she is growing to, at least from what I am interpreting, she's growing to love the child. And that's why at the end of the movie, like she she needs the child because she's gone through all of this for her son, who's then taken away from her. And I found that really fascinating and a really beautiful and interesting kind of unique um perspective on motherhood, from what I've seen. And I would I'm curious to know how um Joe Marcantonio and his co-writer uh kind of came to these uh intimate and tender takes on femininity and motherhood and things that are so unique and um you know specific to the female experience.

Another thing uh that was fascinating to me was issues of race in this movie. For the most part, Charlotte is the only person of color in this movie. There's this really striking image of her at Ben's funeral where there are kind of crowds of white people on the sides of the screen, and she is isolated in the center, the only black person. And I found that really fascinating that not only is she the other in this house because she doesn't belong there by blood, but she's also um an other in race, and she's you know separate from Margaret and Thomas by experience and culture as well. The other thing about race is that for the most part, the people interacting with Charlotte are white, the people antagonizing her, even her best friend at work who ends up betraying her is white.

The person who helps her, the sonographer who thinks she's helping her, is another woman of color. And she doesn't, um, I would assume doesn't know that when she's bringing Charlotte's doctor in, that she's actually um doing something bad. And it's interesting to me that the only person who's willing to help Charlotte and believe Charlotte is another woman of color. Because I think that going back to this theme of trust, this movie's making a really interesting and of the moment statement about a distrust of other people. And as we've kind of been going through this cultural global push for more equity and justice for people of color, I think that this movie is making a really interesting statement about how all of the white people in this movie aren't willing to do that for Charlotte.

Their immediate thought is that she's crazy. My other thought is that this movie I think does a really lovely job of playing with symbolism. I used to love to read a lot when I was in high school and college, and I would read these gothic novels like Jane Eyre or classic literature, which is always just filled to the brim with meaning and symbolism, um, in a very like classical way that seems to kind of pass by a lot of modern stories. And so all of the crows, these bad omens that are coming to um Charlotte throughout the movie, and in the end kind of being her downfall, um, I thought was really like it felt like I was reading an old novel, watching this movie, in the same way as as those crows are symbolizing bad luck or um actually going from symbolism to being a destructive force in her.

Um, you know, I'm assuming she's hallucinating these crows throughout the whole movie, which could be a symbol of her psychosis. I again, I think that she is sane for the most part, but who knows? Uh, I think the same thing with the music. We hear Dream a Little Dream of Me and Claire Deloon played multiple times throughout the movie, and what I think are interesting. About these two songs in this film is that both are about nighttime. Claire de Loon is about moonlight and Dream Little Dream of Me is. I mean, it's a romantic song, but it's also about, you know, you're you dream when you're asleep. And so both of those are about kind of the the beauty of nighttime and not the the darkness of nighttime.

And whenever we hear those songs, they're being performed or sung by Thomas. Or um, you know, I think that the music is just as much an omen of the again rose-colored way that those characters are seeing this movie, that there's there's a goodness to their darkness when really we're seeing the other side of their darkness. We're seeing the nightmare and we're seeing the the shadows outside of the moonlight that the moonlight is causing. And so I think that the use of music is really lovely. I haven't really formulated an opinion on the use of ma Yo-Yo Ma's cello piece in this film, but that is just a lovely stylistic moment when um Charlotte's friend Jane is driving her back to the house and she's screaming in silence and even punching Jane in the face, and Yo-Yo Ma is playing away at that cello, and it kind of becomes distorted by the end.

I think that that's a really lovely moment and a much more lively song than the other ones that they're playing, which are a little more uh, you know, lulling. And so maybe that has something to do with it that she thinks she's she's found her way out and she's finding life through that that more um alive song. I don't know, just making that up. We'll see. Now, in Kindred, there's only one murder, and it's Ben's. So usually I would replace most memorable murder with most memorable moment, but either way, I'm going to say it is Ben's death. I think that that moment was so emotionally distressing to me. Seeing Charlotte in the back of the car holding his face, which is so disfigured and gross looking, his like dead eyes and pale skin and that big gash.

It reminded me of, you know, like seeing Natalie Portman and Jackie holding, um, holding Kennedy's head in the back of the car, which was another movie that disturbed or moment in a movie that disturbed me. I thought that that was really tragic and upsetting, and I'm going to give him he's the only murderer, and I give it to him. Most memorable murder goes to Ben. I thought that that was a really striking moment in this film that really lingered with the discomfort, which was great. Now, as much as I'm raving about this movie, on a scary scale of one to five, I mean, I'm I'm going to give it a zero. I do not find that or a one.

I'll give it a one. I don't find it particularly scary. I think that there's distress and the tension and the um these moments of disturbing treatment and torture, even. Um, although torture is kind of a a strong word to use necessarily in the context of a horror movie podcast where we've watched Saw and Hostel. But I do think that if if you're looking for a fun Friday night horror film, this isn't for you. But if you're if you're in the mood for something a little more challenging and a little slower, not that you know, slash and dash movies can't be challenging, but I think that this is one that you'll want to soak in and take time with and pay attention to.

So take keep that in mind. Now, would I give Kendred a smash or a slash? I think that nobody in my audience right now, listening in their earbuds, are fooled that I'm giving this bad boy a smash. I think that it was really emotional and proof that you don't have to reinvent horror to make a really effective, really good horror film. You can use what's come before you and you can do it in a way that's unique and exciting, and I think that Kendred is a prime example of that. Finally, last question: what's my favorite scary movie? Well, I am pleased to inform you that I am shifting, I am changing, I am swept away with the excitement of Kendred, and Kendred is now my favorite scary movie.

So next week, Caroline and Ian are back, baby, and we are discussing a much requested film. We are looking at, according to science, the most scary movie of all time. See that Forbes article that was being passed around, Sinister. So look forward to our review and discussion of Sinister next week. And while you're waiting for that, you can pop on over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review that would be so, so helpful for helping us grow the what's your favorite scary movie community? My name is Parker. You can find me on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd at Parker Del Rey. You can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash scary moviepod, where we're putting out bonus episodes, including this month and next Friday, a faceoff of the two uh movie versions of Roll Dolls the Witches.

So you gotta head on over there so that you can tune in to that. I'm so excited. You can find what's your favorite scary movie on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Scarymovie Pod. You can find our headquarters for our calendar and many more fun things at scary moviepod dot com. And you can send feedback and requests, and just if you want to chit chat to scary moviepod at gmail dot com. Goodbye.