Family Matters

Kin (2018) is another one of those small-scale, character driven, indie thrillers, a genre we didn’t really know existed. But we’re getting the idea.

It  starts with a black youngster, Miles Truitt, cruising around on his bike in abandoned buildings, scrapping. He sees some weird things, including a heavily armored body and a big black box. He heads home to find his white (adopted) father Dennis Quaid pissed off about him getting detention. Quaid is a construction worker trying to do right by his kid - “I’m tough on you because the world is tough.”

One reason for his attitude might be his other, not adopted son, Jack Reynor, who shows up after a stint in prison. Quaid warns Truitt not to get to friendly, but they seem to get on. But it turns out that some of Reynor’s “friends” from prison want a lot of money for protecting him in prison. Long story short, Quaid gets killed in a robbery gone bad - also most of the protection gang, lead by James Franco. Now Reynor really has to get out of town.

He tells his little brother that their dad will be working round the clock shifts, and they should go on a road trip. So they take off. They start to bond, and Reynor decides to spend some of the robbery money at a strip club. He lets Truitt (who’s about 13?) pick a girl, and he chooses Zoe Kravitz. Things get a little out of hand, and the bouncers start beating up on Reynor and Kravitz. But remember that weird black box from the abandoned building? I forgot to tell you that it’s an alien weapon, and Truitt uses it to start blasting the club. So Truitt, Reynor, and now Kravitz take off together.

That’s the kind of funny thing about this movie - for long stretches you forget that the kid found alien tech. We get occasional cuts of two armored types coming after the weapon, for a good bit on stolen motorbikes. But this is mostly a simple family drama about bad decisions, race, and in the end, a missing mother.

The ending is a bit pat - I’m not in love with it. It leans too heavily into the SF premise that most of the movie leans away from. In fact, I kind of wonder if that premise is even necessary. But some of these indies embrace genre not because the story needs to be told in a genre, but because the people making it love genre. So El Royale was mixed mystery-thriller with cult-horror. Colossal adds kaiju to an addiction story. And so on. I only figured out that these are somehow a category because I see previews for them in each others’ movies.