Movie Review | Kinetta

A brief look at Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2005 film, Kinetta, which isn’t very good.

WTF is Kinetta?

Kinetta described on IMDB:

At a Greek hotel in the off-season, a chambermaid, a man obsessed with BMW cars, and a photo-store clerk attempt to film and photograph various badly re-enacted struggles between a man and a woman.

Kinetta described on Wikipedia:

During off-season at the Greek seaside resort of Kinetta, three perfect strangers — a police officer out of uniform with a thing for German luxury cars and Russian women, an eccentric photographer, and a hotel chambermaid — join forces for a rather strange reason: to recreate homicides. Meticulously and with an almost ritualistic approach, the unlikely trio reenact crime scenes of brutal murders, to the point where the boundaries of their own private lives slowly begin to blur. Does this alliance lead somewhere?

I went into a screening of Kinetta at Austin Film Society on Sunday, January 26, 2020 without any preconceptions or knowledge about the film, other than that it was directed by the same guy who did The Lobster, and I vaguely remember liking that movie, but also remember being somewhat unsure about it, too.

I should have been tipped-off by the slightly too-long and uncomfortable introduction made before the start of the film that the film would follow suit and be slightly too-long and uncomfortable to watch. You live and you learn.

The Review

I read another review that called Kinetta the reason why contemporary Greek cinema is bad — Lanthimos developed a style that’s alright, but not great, and everyone in Greece has subsequently tried to mimmic his style of filmmaking probably because he got to make a movie with Colin Farrell. That review was p harsh, but not innacruate.

The movie is not good, but isn’t entirely without redemption — several scenes build palpable tension (especially one where Evangelia Randou is shillouetted against a pale Medditerranean, disconnected from the pale Greek sky only by a white sliver of horizon), but Lanthimos deflates your excitment bubble with yet another shaky, convoluted AF scene that does more of a disservice to the narrative, “avant-garde-ness,” and literally any sense of enjoyment the viewer might be able to squeeze out of the gimmicky, overrought, overcooked mess of a moussaka that Kinetta turned out to be.

In Conclusion

The descriptions of Kinetta you’ve read in various places don’t matter, and post-rationalize BS reasons for the films’ 3 main characters to do the weird shit they do. Lanthimos over-used a gimmicky conceit and gave young Greek filmmakers a bad interpretation of avant-garde filmmaking to use as their divining rod.