In the Flesh: Kindred

I don’t know that I’ve seen a nastier, more brutal ending since The Devil’s Bath. The sight of two well-heeled British aristos cooing over the baby they’ve stolen from a young Black woman, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who they kept confined for months is so loathsome it feels like snuff footage. Charlotte herself is gone, swallowed up by a mental health system only too happy to part Black mothers from their babies. This is Rosemary’s Baby if Guy and the Satanists somehow gave less of a shit about Rosemary’s sanity and wellbeing, if it wasn’t just that they felt entitled to her body and reproductive labor but that they believed at a fundamental, unspoken level that she wasn’t much more than a thing. A machine. At least Rosemary got to hold the antichrist. At least Katherine Cross got to know her mother for a little bit in Chinatown.

Joe Marcantonio’s Kindred isn’t perfect. There’s a later hallucination scene that doesn’t play, and some of the earlier material with Charlotte’s boyfriend Ben (Edward Holcroft) is a bit threadbare. The colors are a bit washed out, although the lighting is phenomenal (a scene in which Margaret (Fiona Shaw) delivers a monologue about motherhood makes her look like a demon pulled straight out of a Beksiński painting), and the excellent Lawrance is given a few too many repetitive beats. Where the film lives, and where it fails most significantly, is in its two showpieces monologues. One, Margaret’s aforementioned explanation of her inability to bond with Ben after his birth, feels like watching someone unstitch a wound in front of you. Her stepson Thomas’s (Jack Lowden) later blithe discussion of his brutal upbringing, the reason for his undying loyalty to Margaret, and the day he decided to murder his abusive drunk of a father in the grisliest way imaginable is just as good, a shocking recontextualization of his entire character in the same way Max von Meyerling shifts the entire frame of Sunset Boulevard by revealing he used to be Norma Desmond’s husband.

But where’s Charlotte’s monologue? The material is there. Her mother suffered from perinatal psychosis and severe postpartum depression, and we’re made to understand Charlotte grew up in the ongoing wreckage of her life, but where’s her chance to talk about it? Too much screen time is devoted to the logistics of her entrapment, to the psychological motivations of her captors. There’s nothing left for the woman the erasure of whose existence is the film’s putative thematic point. Lawrance has the chops, to be sure. She is blisteringly singular, a hard-edged woman coming up against the soft, encompassing faux-politeness of the British upper crust, a paradoxical emotional reticence in service to incredibly raw dysfunction. The toughness and resourcefulness she has so clearly carefully cultivated and which she deploys in her repeated attempts to escape is left unexplored, and a remarkable film is a little poorer for it.