How solid is the line dividing gothic suspense from trauma porn? The literary genre, which originated with a series of 18th-century “woman trapped in a creaky old estate with a questionable aristocrat” novels, has always used women’s justifiable fear of men as the basis for titillating tales. Meant to offer moral instruction, risqué pleasure, or, more recently, feminist commentary, the genre sublimates the actual threat of sexual violation into an extended scenario of confinement and (attempted) escape.
Arguably, this kind of story is always fetishistic. However, if we go by an infamous expression in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion in the obscenity case Jacobellis v. Ohio—“I know it when I see it”—then we might end up bringing the gavel down on Joe Marcantonio’s adaptation of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred. The story, which concerns a black woman gradually discovering that a charitable offer from her dead white beau’s family conceals a plot to kidnap, exploit, and possibly kill her, is redolent of Get Out. But while each twist of Jordan Peele’s film delves deeper into the visceral surreality of racism, Kindred doesn’t twist so much as it loops, taking us repeatedly through the same trauma of escape and recapture.
The film’s hero, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrence), works at a stable in the English countryside, where, one gray and foggy day, a horse kicks and kills her romantic partner, Ben (Edward Holcroft). Before Ben’s tragic demise, his mother, Margaret (Fiona Shaw), a descendent of aristocrats desperately clinging to the family’s heritage, already resented Charlotte: After some troubling events in Charlotte’s life that the film gradually elucidates, the couple had planned to move to Australia for a new start, taking Ben’s precious family seed with them.
As it happens, Charlotte has just discovered that she’s pregnant, which means that the family line can continue even after Ben’s death. The couple had been living in a crumbling estate owned by Ben’s family, and Charlotte hadn’t wanted to keep the pregnancy, but both situations come to change after Ben’s death. Margaret, who apparently yields much power in their small community despite the decline of the aristocracy, cooks up a conspiracy to keep the forthcoming baby in England. Charlotte is dispossessed, locked up in the estate watched over by Margaret and her stepson-cum-manservant, Thomas (Jack London), and gaslighted by the family’s private ob-gyn, Dr. Richards (Anton Lesser), whose long gray hair and all-black garb make him look like a 17th-century Puritan doctor on the verge of prescribing a stake-burning.
The racial dynamics of Margaret’s resentment and kidnapping are plain enough, and for a while Kindred is a genuinely unsettling horror allegory about the ease with which a powerful white woman can strip autonomy from a black woman. As Margaret, Shaw channels the icy callousness familiar from her role as Carolyn Martens on Killing Eve but also a distractedness that points to the character’s nefarious motives and moral perversity. A long monologue in which Margaret delivers her plans for Charlotte in barely coded terms, the camera inching toward her at an almost imperceptible speed, is the film’s highlight.
Plagued by dreams and visions of ravens that augur the possible onset of the depression and delusion to which her mother succumbed, Charlotte is slow to react to her situation when she awakens from a fainting incident in Margaret’s estate. Marcantonio effectively creates an imposing environment with the brooding presence of the ravens and other pieces of moody mise-en-scène, but there’s a creakiness to the story that often makes it more aggravating than horrifying or unnerving. The film’s soundtrack also undermines the unsettling mood of the visuals by attempting to make both Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major,” two pieces whose overriding affect is serenity, into ironic horror-movie motifs.
Plainly, that kind of studied discordance is meant to embellish the tension as Charlotte tries to maintain her sanity in the distorted reality of Margaret and Thomas’s home. Early on, Kindred offers up some effectually unsettling sights and sounds, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that it has nothing left to say long before it staggers, alongside its very pregnant heroine, toward the finish line. And by then, it’s hard to find horror or pleasure in its repetition.
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