Mark Reviews Movies: KINDRED

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 5, 2020

Co-writer/director Joe Marcantonio tells a story about gaslighting that makes a solid effort to fool us. Indeed, we're always on the side of Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), the pregnant protagonist of Kindred, but there's enough to doubt here in the telling of this story to leave us wondering if at least one of the apparent antagonists might be on her side, too.

That's more difficult to pull off than one might expect, especially since the entire scenario of this story is seen from Charlotte's perspective. She doesn't trust either of her apparent captors, so we shouldn't, either, but man, one of them sometimes surprises us with how genuine his concern with her care is—or maybe just seems. The result is tricky to describe and trickier to accomplish: We don't doubt Charlotte's worry, fear, and absolutely justified desire to escape, but we do start to doubt our own perception and assumptions of what's actually happening here.

For the most part, it's straightforward. Charlotte is dating Ben (Edward Holcroft), who comes from a wealthy family in a long line of not-so-olden aristocrats in Great Britain. She can't stand the remnants of his family, and neither can he. They're planning to move to Australia, and Margaret (Fiona Shaw), Ben's mother, absolutely fumes at the notion.

This—the country and, specifically, the estate that has lasted for generations—is his home. Margaret and her stepson Thomas (Jack Lowden), who came into the family from her second marriage and now tends to the estate and Margaret, are Ben's family. He cannot simply abandon them.

Ben, good and smart man that he is, doesn't care what Margaret has to say. Everything seems to be set for Charlotte and Ben to have a happy, fulfilling life. She even discovers that she's pregnant.

We briefly learn that Charlotte didn't grow up with her own mother, who suffered from mental health issues. Now, Charlotte only knows that she's uncertain about her own maternal abilities and psychological stability. Despite her misgivings about becoming a mother, Ben is too excited for Charlotte to make the decision she reflexively wants to make. Margaret is now convinced more than ever that the couple needs to marry and remain here. This unexpected development will be the continuation of the family legacy.

In a cruel twist of fate, Margaret gets her wish. Ben is killed in an accident. A grief-stricken Charlotte collapses, unconscious, at the hospital. When she awakens, Charlotte is in that old manor, cold (in both temperature and atmosphere) and falling apart and latched to a past that will never return. Margaret and Thomas assure Charlotte that they will take care of her. She has suffered a loss, just as they have, and after all, there's the matter of Ben's future child—a son, Margaret is convinced.

As one might expect, the story, written by Marcantonio and Jason McColgan, follows Charlotte as she becomes convinced that Margaret and Thomas are keeping her as a prisoner. Their concerns are not for her but for what's currently growing in her womb—an heir, a reminder of Ben, some new blood for a family line that might have ended.

The screenplay makes it obvious that mother and stepson are holding Charlotte against her will. She wants to leave, but they keep her there, with a locked chain on the front gate. She wants to go home, but Margaret says the house where Charlotte and Ben lived has gone into foreclosure. She wants to go to the hospital, but the family has long relied on Dr. Richards (Anton Lesser), who makes house calls and doesn't think Charlotte needs a second opinion.

It's a simple but disquieting setup, partly because Charlotte's own perception of reality gradually becomes warped—the result of trauma (The house is one big, decrepit reminder of everything she has lost) or mental illness emerging (She sees ravens, those reliable portents of death and doom, even before catastrophe falls) or something slipped into her regular cups of tea. We always know she's in the right about her situation, but there's a bigger question: How right are her assumptions about the intentions and methods of her caretakers/jailers?

Marcantonio creates an eerie, claustrophobic mood within this manor, isolated from the world outside it and separated from any real sense of time. It's an appropriately dismal backdrop for the central drama—about certain gaslighting and the open question of to what extent Charlotte is being manipulated—elevated by three very fine performances.

Lawrance, a relative newcomer to the screen, provides a sturdy backbone to the film's intentions, playing Charlotte as suspicious but never paranoid, vulnerable but never fragile, and strong but faced with more challenges than she can tackle all at once. As the severity of her imprisonment becomes clearer, there's a genuine sense of Charlotte's mind working around her assorted problems and figuring out how best to manipulate her manipulators.

As the obvious antagonist, Shaw plays Margaret as a hardened, stubborn woman, although there are moments, skillfully written and performed, when she allows some real pain to show (A story about a young Ben and a dog, meant to display how much she loved her son, is followed up with a most pointed question from Charlotte, and Margaret's apathetic omission of that key detail says a lot about her). Lowden, as the captor whose true intentions aren't quite as obvious, is particularly effective in how his silence and soft-spoken manner remain a cipher. He's either a creep or, in a way, a prisoner himself.

Indeed, they're all prisoners (to grief, to the past, to certainty and uncertainty, to loyalty) in some fashion—some far more literal than others. That dynamic makes it more difficult to determine just enough about what's really happening in the minds and hearts of the characters in Kindred. It's those questions that haunt the experience.

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