Kinetta

Well. I'm not sure why, but I love movies like these.

Not a plot going on, not a very known backstory, lots of experiments... Great.

I do love this director, but never heard about this one.

Decided to take a look and... well. I truly enjoyed It.

I never went to Greece so... maybe there's a lot of things that make sense only for the locals but, still, I loved the ambience, the rythm, the silence.

It touched me in a strange way.

I'm not sure If this is a movie to recommend, but give It a chance.

Maybe, who known, it's your kind of movie too?

And, for sure, it's a great introduction to Yorgos cinema.

Yorgos Lanthimos' solo directorial debut is a 95 mins long exercise in boredom & nonsense that at first piques the curiosity with its perplexing premise but it doesn't take long for the interest to fizzle out. An experimental drama that deals with psychology & behaviour studies through three strangers who team up to recreate badly reenacted scenes of homicides, Kinetta is one hell of a slog.

Also co-written by Lanthimos (Dogtooth & Alps), the story should've sufficed as a short film, for it doesn't have enough material to deliver as a feature-length narrative. Lanthimos' lets the plot to drift & wander with no sense of direction and the dreary ambience & awful camerawork don't help the cause either. There are however signs of quirkiness that the director is today known for but it's not refined.

The dizzy handheld camerawork becomes a bother after a while and the characters being cold & distant don't offer any inlet into the story as well. Performances are barely serviceable, its 95 mins narrative is tediously paced and bland editing makes the whole thing a frustrating sit. The idiosyncrasy on display doesn't have much to hold on to, and just being able to sit through it all feels like an achievement.

Overall, Kinetta is a dull, lifeless & excruciatingly slow offering that unfolds like a story on stasis and suffers from poor direction, lazy writing & no idea about what it wants to be. An experiment by the filmmaker to carve out his own unique style by throwing around a few ideas & checking if any of it sticks, this Greek picture is neither properly executed nor thought through and is solely reserved for Lanthimos completists.

at last, something new is going on Greek cinema. i was disappointed by reading the summary in Thessaloníki film festival. it is not a film that tells a history, thus it is not worth searching for academic forms just to try to fit in a category. i was excited that a Greek film can touch me without listening thousands words by the actors with the dictionary of hard meanings on my legs. the film is using, simply, the language of body, helping it with an excellent camera work and if you are not afraid of leaving yourself free, watching the minimum cinema "effects", you 'll get the sentiment. i saw three kind of people in the film, i saw different kind of people's loneliness and people's imposition of power. risky but very efficient the direction-editing throws to the recycle bin whatever isn't really essential. brilliant music replaces lost people's senses without been overused. imaging there was a lot of improvisation on shooting i am curious of how a choice was taken because the film is running consecutively and nothing seems kicked out. after all, it's a hope that some guys load some 16mm magazines don't wait the big production budgets and do some new cinema.

Ending the year on this is a silent high note. I was pleasantly entertained by Lanthimos' first outing as a solo director.

Lanthimos' has changed so greatly through his career, yet here in this 94 minute feature, his DNA, his mark, his stamp is prevent all throughout. I must profess that I watched this film with only Italian subtitles (On Youtube), while I can somewhat read that language, I luckily didn't find any problems as this film is surprisingly sparse in the dialogue department. There is perhaps less than ten minutes of dialogue, all in Greek of course, and I got the gist of it from my dodgy Italian reading. Yet, this film is intensely visual, Lanthimos' trademark (By this point), is a language of its own.

The film is set in a small Hellenic resort, with three nameless characters. The chambermaid, he BMW lover and the photography man. A great deal of these performances is non-verbal, and based solely on bodily expression with a few from the face. Much of the framing os focused on bodies, the lens is in a funny aspect ratio and it (I believe) is in 35mm film. This sounds awfully like perhaps the foundations of the "Greek Weird/New Wave" of film style.

The performances were all of a good quality, particularly so as there was so little dialogue, this was well performed in that regard. In particular I found for Evangelia Randou to stand out as perhaps the best.

The Cinematography is primarily handheld, and the beginning's of Lanthimos' distinctive style just begin to creep out in some spots during this film, particularly during the first act and towards the very end of the film. But i must criticise that a lot of hand held work was extremely shaky, in some places it was almost too shaky, and how this then contrasts to the very level and more classical Lanthimos' style is rather jarring in places, and a fault in the editing, quite a deep one at that measure.

At times this film went twenty minutes without uttering a word, while this made for a quiet and strangely engaging experience. At times it felt a little sparse, as some of the contemporary reviews of the time called it 'nihilistic' - that it stands and believes in nothing. And I must disagree, seeing this film from the arse end of 2018 perspective, I believe that it actually a message about the monotony of life. How the world just turns and turns, eventually leading the main character to do what she finally tries at the end. After everything that happens, that is the snap. This films message, I think to be, is about life, it is about how we spend our time. And I think the critics from when this film was released got it wrong, this film is not nihilistic.

The direction of this film, like in the Cinematography is small inklings of Lanthimos' later work. This feels like Proto-Lanthimos, it was highly intriguing to see, the things which stuck, the things that changed, and the aspects of his style that are still the same to this day. The change from this to his mastery in 'Dogtooth' just four years later, shows his incredible growth and maturity and a director, a change so dramatic that it is rarely seen from many directors.

Overall this was a little fun experience, but this films jarringness, and lack of dialogue made it for a tonally quite inconsistent film. While some aspects are forgettable, others are so distinctly Lanthimos that it is quite fun to behold. But this still feels like a style in growth, thus the final product is stunted, and somewhat weak. This film is worth seeing of you are a fan of Yorgos Lanthimos, or are interested in the forming of the new Greek wave. I give it a 3/5.

I met Lanthimos in 2016 with Dogtooth, but what really made me love his filmmaking was The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I loved the ambiguity, the unsettling feeling, and, of course, the deadpan delivery of the characters. In Kinetta I found very little of that Lanthimos. The movie has little dialogue, and I see it more as an experience than a story. We don't get to know too much about the characters. Hell, we don't even know their names. The plot is nowhere to be found. A lot of times it seems that nothing is happening at all: people walking, cleaning the hotel rooms, eating ice cream, and so on. The pacing is extremely slow, and many scenes drag on for too long. The camera is handheld, sometimes too shaky, and far away from the pristine visuals in Lanthimos latest films. However, I do believe that there's something here. The constant discovery of who the filmmaker is that many years later will develop all of those idyosincrasies and end up making some of the best movies ever.