It always seems to me a bold move – and a risk – to start your film with what are evidently the closing scenes, but that is just what we get with Next of Kin, a mystery mixed with a horror, and the sole foray into genre film from director Tony Williams. A young woman, smeared with blood, is about to get into her car and flee the scene of a small town diner, where things have clearly gone down. A voiceover briefly explains that this young woman, Linda (Jacki Kerin) has recently inherited all of her late mother’s estate – which includes a large residential care home, Montclare. It’s an ominous overlay, and we’re primed for things to go wrong for this woman; it only remains to be seen how this is going to happen over the course of ninety minutes.
Montclare itself is a sprawling place with a lot of sitting tenants, but Linda makes herself at home, even getting involved with some of the care duties (hey, these were innocent times – people didn’t trouble themselves with things like safeguarding). There’s a small team of staff at hand, including a doctor on call, and things seem okay to begin with. However, before long there’s a death – and as Linda gradually begins to work her way through her mother’s papers, reading about her mother’s anxieties about something strange going on at Montclare, Linda begins to experience similar things, her nostalgia now tinged with fear. She begins to investigate the history of the house, but more and more, she’s convinced that someone is keeping an eye on her.
Next of Kin is a strange one. On one hand, it holds off on the plot exposition, leaving Linda to face things on her own and keeping the audience as much in the dark as she is, wondering whether the scares she is experiencing are supernatural in origin, or not. The film is very much centred on Linda, with not that much coming from the other characters in the film really, and to be fair to Kerin, she does a decent job, although her responses to what is happening to her can be hard to relate to; things which ought to have her in bits seem not to, whereas quite ordinary things generate hysterics. But on the other hand, after keeping things on the down low for the largest share of the running time, Next of Kin motors through the denouement, more or less having Linda happen upon the very page her mother’s diaries that tells her what she needs to know before things get spelled out very rapidly in the end scenes, and so we’re suddenly back to where we started. This is odd, given that the film is such a slow burner, for the most part; very little actually happens over the first hour. This could be a challenge for modern audiences, perhaps as a symptom of our shrinking concentration spans, but then again, it is better to have a little more action as a motivation to engage with the plot before we run out of film. There are some very effective scenes here, nonetheless (the corpse in the bath made me wince) and the film allows these to settle on the audience, allowing them their impact.
The Australia of Next of Kin feels very familiar: it’s a place unusually populated by RP English speakers, not unlike Patrick (1978) actually, which had been made just a few years previously. Now that I think of it, an isolated young woman being made to face down frightening events in an isolated setting – there are other parallels. No doubt Patrick’s modest successes had an impact on subsequent genre films being made in the country. The sets here are effective, and you do get a sense of the isolation of the place, which is important in how things play out. Williams also has a keen eye when it comes to setting up some of the scenes, and this is a well-made film from a technical point of view, which will appeal to many on those grounds.
Overall, this is a film which very much has its moments, throwing in some surprising ultraviolence too, though some of the disparity in pace dents the goodwill somewhat. Also, sadly, there were a few issues with the transfer on my screener which meant I couldn’t see some of the key scenes at the end; hopefully this is a just a tic, and the rest of the discs are fine, though it was a little frustrating, having waited for things to get going. Next of Kin will reward people who like their horrors more understated – well, up until a point in time, at least.
Next of Kin will be released by Second Sight films on 25th March 2019.