Spontaneous suicide of sequestered civilian spirals surreptitiously so his descendant seeks a surmountable solution.

After the death of her father, Helen is immediately in a horrible car accident while pregnant. She wakes up from a year-long coma to the alarming news but the baby survived. Her husband Greg informs her they lost their house and must live in her father’s condo, which he left to them. Detective Shepherd arrives asking questions about the suicide while she’s rehabilitating. She says she doesn’t remember anything. As the mystery unravels, she learns the truth.

Written by Christian J Hearn, The Kindred weaves an intricate web of strange occurrences as Helen digs deeper. He does well at structuring the plot so things don’t feel rushed. He also deals with themes of grief and loss effectively. He makes the hard subject matter more palpable by making Helen a proxy to the audience. Having recently lost a loved one myself, I found this film very personally moving.

Directed by Jamie Patterson, he shoots the scenes with tremendous precision to carefully set the mood. The different camera angles used gave a sense of desperately feeling lost. He uses close-ups tellingly, to depict both vulnerability and anguish from the cast. Most of all I liked how it wasn’t overly reliant on jump scares. He respects the audience by withholding from cheap scare tactics, letting the tension build slowly so it’s earned.

April Pearson is Helen. She plays a defeated, broken-down woman trying to find her strength with such conviction. It’s astonishing. She not only performs vulnerability convincingly but plays a strong-willed woman well too. Conveying a wide range of emotions while going through the stages of grief, her versatility is commendable. Helen is such a sympathetic character, a role like this needs a certain calibre of actor to pull it off.

Blake Harrison is Greg, her loving husband. He’s a single father to a newborn while ascertaining the struggles of being a caretaker to his spouse but conflict brews underneath it all. He’s good at showing his anguish as he’s continuously torn between his wife waking from a coma and the gravity of how her father’s death is consuming her.

James Cosmo is Frank Menzies. He’s a neighbour to the couple when they move into the condo. He also claims to be a friend of Helen’s late father. He helps her along the way providing information about his past. He plays him with that same tremendous magnetism that makes him great in everything.

Robbie Gee is Detective Shepherd. He plays him as a stoic cop who’s been around the block. He reluctantly pursues the case of Hellen’s father further giving a terrific performance as a skeptic adding that sense of doubt to her and the audience.

The original score by Moritz Schmittat is full of guttural bone-chilling pieces of music that perfectly set the tone.

Overall, it’s nice to see a truly original stand-alone story with a great mystery with fully developed characters I cared about directed, written, and acted extremely well in an era of cinema devoted to sequels, reboots, and franchises. It’s refreshing to have a smaller, more personal, self-contained story in The Kindred. The viewer learns things as Helen does which is an intriguing way to push the plot forward in thought-provoking ways and respects the audience so they don’t spoon-feed too much exposition at once. I always love when movie titles have multiple meanings too. And remember, some secrets should remain buried but what about those skeletons in the closet?

9 out of 10