Director Report Card: Lucky McKee (2019)

8. Kindred Spirits

Sometimes, I feel like I'm the biggest Lucky McKee fan in the world. I'm sure that's not true, that some obsessive person outstrips my fandom for the filmmaker. McKee has been making films for almost two decades, some of them accumulating cult followings along the way. Nobody gets labeled a “Master of Horror” without accruing a certain level of fame. At the same time, McKee is not a household name even among movie nerds or horror fanboys. His latest film, “Kindred Spirits” was released last year with almost zero advertising. To the point that the director himself put out an open invitation on Twitter for any sort of press. Which is how I ended up (very nervously) interviewing McKee earlier in the year on this very humble blog of mine. And now the time has come for me to actually give “Kindred Spirits” a proper review. 

Chloe had her daughter, Nicole, when she was only sixteen. Which means that her sister, Sadie, is only a few years older than her niece. When Nicole was a little girl, Aunt Sadie saved her life by pulling her out of traffic. Years later, Chloe is a struggling single mom and Nicole is a troubled teenager. After Nicole gets expelled from school, she comes home to see that Sadie has suddenly moved in. The aunt and niece renew their bond quickly. However, Sadie soon begins to act strangely. She pretends to be a teenager. She learns secrets, such as Chloe dating the father of Nicole's best friend, and manipulates those around with this information. Eventually, someone is going to die.

Almost all of Lucky McKee's movies are about outsiders, struggling to find their place in the world or some pre-existing social structure. “Kindred Spirits” applies the same idea to the premise of a fractured family. We never learn much about Chloe and Sadie's parents or their childhood but it soon becomes apparent that Sadie never felt accepted anywhere but with her sister. She created a fantasy world, via a doll house, acting out her fantasies with a fictional family. (Not dissimilar to May's elaborate, doll-filled inner life.) She returns home because her personal life, we learn in vague terms, has fallen apart. Yet Sadie soon finds her perfect fantasy world, with her sister and niece, ruined by a changing situation. “Kindred Spirits” takes us inside the world of someone so broken, they can't even return home peacefully.

Home isn't the only place Sadie is eager to return to. In one key sequence, she complains to her sister that she feels old because she's in her twenty. At a party with Sadie, she pretends to be a teenager and even makes out with a younger boy. After she patterns her hair after Nicole's, Sadie even begins to seduce her niece's hunky-dumb boyfriend. It's apparent that Sadie is feeling her youth slip away. You get the impression that Sadie's teen years probably weren't great. She's eager to return to that time, to get a re-do on a fraught period of her life. This is an impulse I think most of us can relate to, wanting a chance to return to our younger days with the knowledge we have now. Sadie, of course, takes things too far.

One of the best moves “Kindred Spirits” makes is slowly revealing exactly how crazy Sadie is. At first, she seems simply eccentric, perhaps a bit manic. As her lies and fantasies start to pile up, it's becomes apparent how disconnected Sadie is from reality. The film peppers in vague allusions to her past, never making it totally clear, leaving us unprepared for what's to come. She crosses boundaries with ease, assuming another persona with ease. It's an unsettling to watch, especially once Sadie starts to put herself and others in danger. A moment involving a kitchen counter is especially effective. “Kindred Spirits” does a good job of drawing the audience in and continuously surprising us with each new, unhinged reveal.

“Kindred Spirits” isn't just a “Single White Female”-style story of a lonely psychopath lashing out when her world starts to crumble. Watching Sadie degrade into a killer, hurting the people she ostensibly loves, is engrossing because time is invested in making the characters real. "Kindred Spirits" is especially good at creating a lived-in, lovable sort of feminine bonding. When Sadie is having a bad day, Chloe's anecdote for the blues is junk food and junk television. We are greeted to an adorable scene of the sisters reclining on the couch and watching trashy reality shows. When Sadie and Nicole hang out, we are treated to similarly adorable moments of them bonding. McKee and co-writer Chris Sivertson successfully capture a very specific, and specifically feminine, type of togetherness.

Even though “Kindred Spirits” belongs soundly to the “thriller” side of the horror/thriller equation, Lucky McKee is still a Fangoria fan at heart. He knows when and how to deliver the gross-outs. And “Kindred Spirits” contains a good one. The film doesn't stop with a shovel smashed over someone's head. The metaphor of Sadie's perfect fantasy world being crushed becomes rather literal, as someone goes head first into the dollhouse. McKee doesn't stop there, as he follows that up with debris being picked out of a brain. It's pretty sick, continuing the filmmaker's talent for squirm-inducing gore effects. McKee has always been good at creating novel violence, finding ways to make the internal external in inventively graphic ways.

McKee hasn't just always shown a knack for creating good stories for women. He's also always found strong female performers. Caitlin Stasey, previously of “All Cheerleaders Die,” is excellent as Sadie. While not doing a great job of disguising her Australian accent, Stasey manages to make a complex, nuanced character. Sadie isn't a two-dimensional psychopath. She's someone with a sad inner-life, driven to do crimes out of loneliness and a need to belong. She also projects a certain vulnerability, making it clear why she can lure people into an assailable state. Sasha Frolova is similarly good as Nicole. Nichole is struggling with typical teenage problems, testing boundaries with her mother and other authority figures. Frolova has a natural charisma that attracts the viewer's eye, making you want to follow her and her character on this journey.

The only marquee name in “Kindred Spirits” is Thora Birch, as Chloe. Birch, who certainly has first-hand experience with messed-up families, plays Chloe as a single mom struggling to make ends' meet. Her daughter's trouble distresses her greatly, as much because she fears her child is drifting away from her as for her problems at school. Birch is convincing and likable, making Chloe fully-formed even if she probably has the least interesting role in the film. Macon Blair, best known for appearing in Jeremy Saulnier's films, also shows up as Chloe's boyfriend. Blair is amusingly avuncular, as a normal guy who doesn't realize the trouble he's getting into until it's much too late.

Throughout his career, Lucky McKee has maintained certain visual quirks. Such as a strong use of color. This continues in “Kindred Spirits.” In one particularly note-worthy moment, red lights shine through a predominately blue colored room. In general, “Kindred Spirits” is a nice looking movie. Largely shot on interior sets, McKee creates a real intimate feeling throughout most of the film. I've always found McKee's movies to have a lush feeling, creating something beautiful out of every day settings. The film also has a lovely and evocative score from Joe Kraemer, which adds a wonderfully personal feeling to much of the story.

Other times, however, “Kindred Spirits” feels exactly like the low-budget production it is. More than once, the movie employs disappointing visual tricks. Like slow-motion addled montages, which occur several times. This is really noticeable in several flashback sequences, which have that cliched flashback style glow to them. While McKee makes excellent use of color in some scenes, other sequences look somewhat washed-out and plain. The film's various flaws become truly apparent in the last act, where the climax is somewhat visually muddled and even includes some awkward editing around a throat slicing.

On the festival circuits, more than one reviewer compared “Kindred Spirits” to a Lifetime Movie. I can't say I watch a lot of Lifetime Channel movies but I think I understand what they mean. The film features many scenes of relationship melodrama, especially once Sadie starts to play Nicole and her friends against each other by reviewing secrets. Teen girls and adult women getting upset because private business is being aired seems to fit the stereotype of “women's television.” (I don't think most Lifetime movies, however, feature heads getting smashed open. But I could be wrong!) 

Perhaps fittingly enough, “Kindred Spirits” actually would make its debut on the Lifetime Channel, with a surprise premiere during last October. This was a surprise even to Lucky, who was not made aware of the television screening until a few hours before it happened. “Kindred Spirits'” proper debut would happen on video-on-demand a few months later. Considering the film's release would receive almost no advertising, the showing on Lifetime probably exposed the movie to a far wider audience than it otherwise might've received. (Though I do have to wonder what that network's regular viewers thought of this one.) If “Kindred Spirits” attracts the same cult following as McKee's earlier films, I don't know. However, I suspect it will. It's a nicely acted and amusingly twisted riff on the themes McKee has been working with his entire career. [Grade: B+]