Let’s be honest: we’ve all seen a bad student film. The kind where the director insists that silence is profound, wide shots are holy, and plot is bourgeoisie. Kinetta, the cinematic debut of Greece’s deadpan emperor Yorgos Lanthimos, is one of those films—except it had the audacity to get distributed.
In 2005, Lanthimos hadn’t yet weaponized his signature brand of dead-eyed dialogue and absurdist violence. What we get in Kinetta is less “bleak surrealism” and more “security camera footage of lonely people pretending to be interesting.” If this film were a person at a party, it would be the guy silently chain-smoking in the corner, scribbling into a Moleskine and judging your Spotify playlist.
Set in a desolate off-season Greek resort town that looks like it was evacuated halfway through building a yogurt factory, Kinetta follows three characters—none of whom are named, and all of whom look like they regret ever agreeing to be in this movie. There’s a detective who moonlights as a moped mechanic, a camera-store clerk who might be allergic to sunlight, and a maid who says nothing, does less, and somehow still feels overused.
The trio’s shared hobby? Re-enacting murder scenes. That’s right. They meticulously stage the murders of women (with the maid playing dead), while one of them films it and the other grunts direction like a Greek Lars von Trier on lithium. Is it a meditation on violence? A comment on alienation? A kinky live-action roleplay that got way out of hand? Yorgos doesn’t say. Yorgos doesn’t do saying.
The film is nearly silent. Not “tense thriller quiet.” Not “minimalist Scandinavian quiet.” I mean quiet like you accidentally muted the TV and didn’t realize for 45 minutes. Whole stretches go by where nothing happens but people sitting, staring, and occasionally rehearsing how to pretend-murder a corpse without knocking over a prop lamp.
Lanthimos’s camera follows these characters like a ghost with ADD. Handheld. Off-center. Out of focus. At one point, the maid walks down a hallway and the camera follows her back for two entire minutes like it’s trying to remember what movie it’s in. It’s not poetic—it’s an eye exam.
Cinematographically, Kinetta is what happens when you give someone a 16mm camera, tell them “no rules,” and then leave them alone in a half-renovated hotel for a weekend with a bottle of ouzo. There’s no coverage. No rhythm. Just long, static shots of sadness, occasionally interrupted by jittery zooms or a sudden shift to something somehow even less coherent.
And the characters? They don’t speak so much as they… exist. Barely. They wander around like NPCs with no side quests. When they do interact, it’s with the emotional range of taxidermy. There’s no development, no exposition, no chemistry. Just awkward glances and prolonged silences that make you question if your Wi-Fi dropped mid-stream.
The maid, who should be the emotional center of the story, is instead used like a prop—a mop-wielding mannequin dragged into these sadomasochistic dioramas of death while the men obsessively fine-tune her corpse posture. You get the sense that Lanthimos is trying to say something about objectification. But by the 5th fake strangulation scene, it feels less like commentary and more like a film school project that should’ve been shut down by HR.
And let’s not forget the soundtrack. Oh wait—you can, because there isn’t one. What you get instead are ambient room tones, the occasional clatter of cheap furniture, and the dull roar of wind off the coast. It’s like an ASMR video made by Werner Herzog’s depressed cousin. When there is music, it’s brief, distorted, and about as comforting as a dial-up modem in a haunted house.
But the real question—haunting you long after the credits roll—is “Why?” What are these people doing? What do they want? Why are they recreating murders in half-baked pantomime with the energy of underpaid mannequins? Lanthimos doesn’t answer. He’s not here to satisfy your narrative hunger. He’s here to starve you. Artistically. Emotionally. Spiritually.
By the 70-minute mark, I began rooting for a real murder, just to add some stakes. Anything. A plot. A line of dialogue with some urgency. Hell, a strong gust of wind with narrative intent.
Lanthimos would go on to make Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favourite—weird, sharp, unsettling masterpieces that turn deadpan surrealism into high art. Kinetta is not that. It’s the ugly larval stage of his later brilliance. A cinematic fossil. A painful reminder that even great directors once made deeply weird, barely watchable nonsense.
Watching Kinetta is like staring into an abandoned refrigerator: cold, unsettling, and vaguely moldy. You’re not sure what it was supposed to be, but you know it’s expired. You sit through it not because you’re enjoying it, but because part of you hopes there’s a payoff. There isn’t. There’s no climax. No revelation. Just more re-enacted stabbings and silent mopeds.
Final Verdict?
Kinetta is 95 minutes of atmospheric dread with all the urgency of a deflated air mattress. It’s a film so opaque, it makes Eraserhead look like Paddington 2. It’s not a story. It’s a tone poem written in invisible ink by someone who resents your attention span.
Watch it if you’re a Lanthimos completionist, a masochist, or just want to feel something—anything—by enduring cinematic purgatory. Everyone else? Skip it and go stare at a dead plant for two hours. You’ll get the same emotional journey, but at least the plant won’t change aspect ratios every time it gets bored.
