One of the very best voices in contemporary horror — and, to be honest, one of my favorites currently making movies — writer/director Lucky McKee doesn’t make films that could be made by anyone else. His work is challenging and audacious, playful, and very funny. It is political in the sense that, in movies like May, The Woman, The Woods, and Sick Girl (his contribution to Masters of Horror), McKee primarily tells stories about women from the perspective of women, presenting them not as infallible heroes or psychotic villains but as three-dimensional human beings with strengths and flaws, capable of doing good (or, at the very least, meaning well) and of doing unspeakably evil acts. Though things have improved somewhat in recent years, women have been boxed into “types” in the horror genre for so long that taking them out of those boxes and affording them depth and focus feels somewhat revolutionary. It’s just one of the many things that makes Lucky McKee the best.
His latest, Kindred Spirits, dials back on the horror elements but continues his tradition of telling female-centric stories. It stars Thora Birch as Chloe, a single mother of teenage daughter Nicole (Sasha Frolova), a rebellious girl beginning to come into her own. Into their lives returns Sadie (Caitlin Stasey), Chloe’s free-spirited sister who’s been estranged for the last year. Sadie moves back in with the women and is quickly attending high school parties with Nicole and inserting herself into Chloe’s relationship with Alex (Macon Blair), the father of Nicole’s best friend and Chloe’s sort-of secret boyfriend. She gets too close too quickly, and it gradually becomes apparent that maybe Sadie’s motives aren’t entirely innocent.
Kindred Spirits reunites McKee with longtime friend and collaborator Chris Sivertson (I Know Who Killed Me) as screenwriter, and together the pair appears to be riffing on what can best be described as Lifetime movies. There’s an element of domestic melodrama to the screenplay, and a kind of basic cable trashiness to Sadie’s downward spiral that one can easily picture making up a movie of the week. I don’t say any of this as a pejorative; the filmmaking craft is more sophisticated and the overall approach more adult than in any of the TV movies I’ve seen. I think this is what the filmmakers are after. The “woman’s picture” of the 1930s and ‘40s eventually migrated to television for some reason, and McKee and Sivertson are taking it back.
Though there are a small handful of gnarly moments, those looking for the bloody brutality of some of McKee’s past efforts may find themselves disappointed. The horrors of Kindred Spirits are much more of the psychological variety, less a stranger turning your insides out than someone you know and trust turning your life upside down. Thora Birch makes a welcome return as one of Sadie’s victims, a woman who became a mother too young and has spent her entire life trying to hold it all together. It’s Caitlin Stasey movie, though. The actor, who previously worked with McKee and Sivertson on 2013’s All Cheerleaders Die, is equal parts charming and chilling as a woman wearing multiple faces and spinning multiple lies at any given time. She’s scary because she earns your trust, and then uses that trust to do awful things to you behind your back. She may be the closest to a one-note villain that McKee has ever put on screen, but even that is too dismissive a label. There are layers to Sadie – or, more accurately, to Sadie’s madness.
I won’t say I didn’t enjoy Kindred Spirits as much as McKee’s other horror films, because I haven’t lived with it long enough. I didn’t have as visceral a reaction, but that’s not what the movie is after. This film is more about creeping, seemingly innocuous dread – as though the title character from May was more easily to adjust as pass for “normal” in society, but underneath is just as broken and potentially dangerous. Elevated by strong performances and a willingness to go some places from which other filmmakers might shy away, Kindred Sprits is exactly the movie it wants to be. If it wants to be a Lifetime movie, well, it’s a pretty damn good Lifetime movie.
