REVIEW: "Strange Kindness"

Indie thriller has its world premiere at BUFF24

On Thursday, March 21, Strange Kindness premiered at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival’s 2024 edition.

The film opens the morning a small community on Cape Cod is rattled by a violent shooting. Rose (Leanne McLaughlin, who also produced), a nurse taking care of her aunt Chris (Deirdre Madigan), is surprised by her brother James (Kristofor Giordano) returning home. Across town, Chris finds the injured gunman (Michal Vondel) in her living room. As the police go door-to-door searching for the gunman, she assures him “I’m not going to scream.”

The film was shot on location on the Cape by a small crew of 10 people, who raised $33,000 through the film-centric crowd-funding platform Seed & Spark in 2022. Headlining the crew for his feature film debut effort is award-winning music video director Joseph Mault, who pulled triple duty on Strange Kindness as the writer, director and cinematographer.

As the plot unfolds from its setup, we follow these dual plotlines and the building tension from their inevitable collision. The story following Chris and the gunman rises to the top as the film’s most compelling, as it contains standout performances from Madigan and Vondel. Their dynamic contains notes of curiosity, disdain and desperation, with something dark lurking in both of their pasts.

As we switch back and forth between the characters, the film swings heavily between a more mumblecore aesthetic of naturalistic dialogue and a heavy-handed, deliberate dynamic that often makes the audience incredibly aware that the actors are reading lines from a script. At times, the sibling plotline makes the audience question its relevance. There are moments of time jumping that have little clear purpose and may leave the viewer puzzled as to what just happened and its importance to the broader story. This plotline is also where the film demonstrates its inability to be more specific and direct when it needs to be, as unimportant moments of exposition and backstory take center stage while moments of high tension and intrigue are left ambiguous, often to a fault.

The film sways between these varying levels of quality and coherence and stumbles along with what it is trying to say. Symbols and metaphors are often left jumbled. Moments of importance flash on the screen so briefly that if you blink, you could miss them. There are lines drawn very thinly between the morality of military combat and violent crime and the varying levels of empathy people have for sanctioned killing as opposed to unsanctioned killing. I would have liked to see this idea explored more, as it seems central to the movie’s thesis, but it seemed brushed to the side almost immediately.

The technical aspects of the film also seem to waver between levels of quality. Having shot with a small crew on a tight budget and using natural lighting, it is understandable how a project like this won’t look the same as something with a monstrous budget. But odd visual things like colors not matching from shot to shot became a distracting game of wondering if there was an artistic meaning or if one shot simply had better lighting.

The editing had its moments of odd choices, cutting to black for extended periods. This is a technique I can appreciate sometimes, making the viewer sit with the ideas presented or hone in on listening more. But, in the case of Strange Kindness, it may begin to annoy the viewer as it is deployed so often with no discernable purpose other than making a sequence last longer.

In these moments, the score often blares and leads the audience through this darkness. Editing issues aside, moments of heavy score became a standout because of how impressive it is. In the post-viewing Q&A, Mault briefly described how most of the score is created using objects seen on-screen in the film. Bamboo from jungle scenes was used to create flutes he then learned to play, creating a droning soundscape by playing them with a delay pedal and layering them on top of each other. The idea of ‘what you see is what you hear’ was incredibly interesting, creating a sort of closed-loop audiovisual sensory experience.

This combination of interesting techniques and ideas can make the movie incredibly compelling. Some ideas don’t come across as clearly as others and a lot of technical aspects can feel unrefined, but that’s the nature of a low-budget indie debut feature. A lot was accomplished with such a low budget and tight crew, and everyone involved is talented. The film left a somewhat bland taste in my mouth, but I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone involved does next.