Kinetta

"Kinetta" is a Drama movie in which we watch a group of strangers, at a Greek hotel in the off-season trying to recreate some homicides and, film and photograph them.

I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to expect from this movie but after watching I need to say that I wasn't ready for this. The plot was weird, it didn't make any sense and the evolution of the movie was slow and boring. The direction which was made by Yorgos Lanthimos was something very different from his new movies. Regarding the interpretations of the cast I don't have much to say since there isn't anything worth saying. Finally, I have to say that "Kinetta" is a weird movie or maybe I didn't understand it.

These days, this director is very famous. I was wondering about the director's first films. I found this movie and watched it. This is not a movie. It didn't make any sense, I waited until the end, maybe something different would happen. It has no value as a movie, nothing happens in the movie. I do not recommend. But strangely, I have never regretted watching this movie. I wonder why ?

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.

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.