Next of Kin **

There are some camera choices and music Tony Williams, as director, applies to give his Aussie film a distinctive look and feel. A figure in shadow distanced in the woods looking at Linda, Linda running to Barney with a camera looking at her from tall grass yards away, a van exploding through a diner, a shot inside the bed of a truck as a diner blows up, a shot from the ceiling pointed down at Linda, in slow motion, her voice's audio altered as well while she escapes down the Montclaire upper hall after stabbing her aunt in the eye through a door keyhole. Williams uses dolly zoom to continually express Linda's psychological trauma regarding a hallway. And even when the pace isn't rushed, Williams isn't static with his camera. And the music score always keeps us at this place where we know something is not right. Something is amiss. I think that is the film's ultimate triumph. Never did I feel comfortable for Linda, although the film gives us plenty of time where she is all throughout the house, outside the house, up at night, pouring through those diary pages, and scouring through folders and closets. And the dead body of the one man found in the tub by Linda's favorite boarder, Lance (Charles McCallum), when stepping into the water and on the poor guy's head. While Linda does defend herself and hold doors closed and locked, she also suffers slight mental breaks or freezes traumatically in place. Most notoriously, Linda is unable to move when her aunt presents herself absent a wig or in the diner after stabbing her aunt and getting away, with a little boy she befriended using a shotgun while she remains almost catatonic...that is before she finally snaps out of it, picks up a shotgun, and blows her antagonist's head off!

I'd say for me, why I really liked Next of Kin (1982) is time and place. Look, I know when someone yet again throws in the word atmospheric the eyes glaze back and a bit of an "ugh" seeps from the lips and face. For lack of a better word, that is really what I thought of and felt while watching Next of Kin. Montclaire could have been just a nursing home, very marble floor, colorless, plain, clinical, but instead these old folks live in a manor in rural Australia. The manor is defined by its personality, its character. This isn't Shady Pines. All those "sinister house" films have a particular architectural uniqueness...a color palate, design, style. Montclaire does as well. 4/5

There's an incredible scene at the end where a water fountain with  a sculpture of angels starts to turn to blood and Linda finds a school chum with her throat slashed, throbbing red. Not only that, but just a little later, Linda is having to fend off Kelvin, who is coming at her with a mallet. The brief but brutal crime scene of Dr. Barton and Connie, butchered in a tub full of water, tells us just how far gone both Auntie Ruth and Kelvin are.