With its many obvious horror influences—Rosemary’s Baby to Get Out to the hallucinatory psychodrama of Poe—being completely conspicuous, this dark, atmospheric British slow-burner even has an old crumbling country house as the centerpiece of its bleak setting.
Expecting mother Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance) and her partner Ben have decided to emigrate to Australia to start a new life together but decide to first visit Ben’s snotty of-the-manor-born mum Margaret (Fiona Shaw), who from the very beginning is keen for the couple to stay on at the family mansion: in fact, she sees Charlotte’s not-yet-born son as the only hope to carry on her family’s lineage and its connections to the estate.
Shaw, a veteran of British stage and screen is at her huffy, aloof best here as the dominating and deranged matriarch: she’s cold, calculating, and clearly begins a psychological slide off the deep end when she hears her son will be living in the lowly land of kangaroos and vegemite and not carrying on her proud family tradition in the family’s shabby-aristocrat country manor.
After Ben tragically dies (the victim of a very heavy-handed plot point), Margaret insists that Charlotte stays as a guest for a while along with her seemingly nice but slightly off-kilter stepson Thomas. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for Charlotte to realize she’s beginning to feel like more of a prisoner than a houseguest. And if Margaret’s increasingly controlling behavior isn’t enough, the filmmakers throw in a bit of nature-terror in the mix, with ominous crows (a la The Omen) and insects doing their part, as if radio-controlled, to terrorize Charlotte into staying in the house.
Although all this happens with enough suspense to hold interest, these events predictably come to a head when Charlotte finally tries to make her escape from this Downton Abbey of evil. Kindred gets by on a clever enough concept and is scary in parts for sure, but the required suspension of belief can be a bit too demanding for comfort. Optional.