Sundance 2022 Film Festival – Kitchen Sink had WTF-ness dripping from every pipe. Written and directed by Alison Maclean, Kitchen Sink was screened in the 2022 Sundance Film Festival as a blast from the past horror out of the year 1989.

After finishing doing her dishes, a woman (Theresa Healey) finds a mysterious thread protruding from her kitchen sink. As she pulls on it, she eventually rips out a chord with a fetus at the end. After cleaning it up, it grows into a man (Peter Tait) that comes alive with a combination of water and her love — if only her love were greater than her curious habits.

Kitchen Sink was a lesson in accepting that not everything that one manifests is going to stay, let alone, is alive. Visually, it is WTF, but at its core is a heartfelt love story, a beautifully messed up necromantic treat. Filmed in black and white, it was still visually striking, oscillating between being down disgusting, emotionally jarring, and anxiety-causing.

The acting performances brought this messed-up romance to life, with the film’s actors displaying a range of emotions as they respectively depicted the different states of death — emotional death after the loss of a loved one from the woman, and of course, physical death from the mysterious being. The actors had to mime their performances as hardly a word was uttered, but writer/director Alison Maclean was careful to move the story forward and explain background information by showing and not telling.

There was a lot to enjoy from Kitchen Sink — despite its name, it avoided throwing in everything but the kitchen sink and instead stripped down to barebones storytelling with limited dialogue, black and white coloring, and a small cast. With few components, Maclean tells a big story that was emotionally weighty gripping, and its gross-out horror was mesmerizing.

8.5 Out of 10