To be honest, I was just looking for something relaxing to put on in the background to help me fall asleep. Scrolling around, half-zoned out, and then - bam - I saw the title.
I stopped in my tracks.
"KLF? THE KLF? Aha aha?!"
I've loved and listened to their music since I was a young little tot - through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, and I'm still blasting KLF in my fourties.
So, obviously, I decided sleep ain't happening. *This* was happening. I grabbed some food, charged my vape, got super comfy... Ready for a late-night nostalgic rabbit hole.
Man... how anticlimactic that turned out to be.
What follows is a documentary that somehow manages to take one of the most unpredictable, flamboyant, anti-establishment acts in music history... and make them boring, confusing, and emotionally hollow.
The main culprit is the editing. It's aggressively stylized, non-linear, and obsessed with recreating the chaos of the KLF's image - but it completely fails at basic storytelling. There's no rhythm, no build, no emotional arc. Just a blender of VHS clips, cryptic voiceovers, reenactments, and half-explained moments that go absolutely nowhere.
Here's one of the worst examples:
Claire Fletcher, who joined the KLF on a weird ritualistic trip to Jura, suddenly says:
"Now I have four children. Kitty Lily Fletcher. It was meant to be, clearly. She hates that story."
What? Who? Why?
Only after pausing to search online did I find out she met her husband on that trip, and they later named their daughter Kitty Lily Fletcher, a tribute to KLF (the initials). That's a genuinely sweet and poetic real-life detail. In the film, it's edited like a riddle on shuffle play.
Same goes for the love story: she mentions reaching out to a guy and suddenly they're married with kids. No setup, no emotional payoff - just a bizarre cut to "happily ever after."
And then there's the completely false claim that "you can't find KLF's music anywhere today."
As I said, I've been enjoying their music for literal decades, from CDs to MP3s to streaming, I can confidently say: that's simply not true.
Their music is on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Bandcamp - it's everywhere. It's a simple google search. So either the filmmakers didn't bother to update that section, or they chose to preserve the myth at the cost of the truth.
I get the intent: reflect the mystery and anti-commercial chaos of the KLF. But that doesn't excuse turning a fascinating story into a disjointed, self-indulgent collage that constantly alienates the viewer. You can be surreal and make sense. You can honor a band's weirdness without confusing the hell out of your audience.
Instead, we get a documentary that refuses to
explain itself, even when it desperately needs to.
There's value in the subject matter - the KLF really were one of the most interesting acts of the 20th century. But this film buries that story under cryptic editing and false mystique.
Unless you're a hardcore fan who already knows all the context, don't expect insight. Just expect vibes.
