Kindred

It's Shaw who steals the show, conveying her character as both a heartless monster and a woman haunted by her own past, with that kind of breathy, distracted haughtiness she does so well.

This could have been the British Get Out, or at least a brutal dissection of class politics with added jump scares. Yet the novice director and co-writer Joe Marcantonio never moves beyond suggested ideas and themes...

By turning its heroine's confinement into a literal ordeal, Kindred grips best as a neo-Victorian nightmare of maternity.

Kindred is a ragged cry of rebellion, calling out to the flock to join forces against the darkness

Its co-writer/director has pulled off a rare feat: He's created a work that interrogates grief with a sociopolitical undercurrent without losing sight of the fact that this is a horror film in the first place.

Never played too broadly, the screenplay questions the sanity of all involved. It gets under your skin, even if it's hardly original.

With an overreliance on classical music and loud sound effects for jump scares, and the strange decision to keep its female-centric themes at arm’s length, unfortunately, Kindred just isn’t all that scary.

It all culminates in a chilling final act that is remarkably restrained (like the bulk of the film) and perfectly fitting.

Kindred was terrifying to watch because it was marked not by force or physical violence but continued and unending gaslighting.

The feature debut of writer/director Joe Marcantonio (co-written with Jason McColgan) is an engaging (and enraging) psychological horror that places him firmly on the map.