Like any film festival worth its salt, the Boston Underground Film Festival draws from every corner of the cinematic globe; indeed, this year’s lineup alone featured films from Malaysia, Hong Kong, France, South Korea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Still, there is a special kind of charge which comes from the locally sourced programming, and seeing the strange and boundless creativity originating from our own backyard. There is an uncanniness in seeing familiar sights and locations being repurposed within the framework of a feature film– and a thrill at the possibility that inspiration can strike anywhere.
One of the most haunting films of the 2024 BUFF lineup was Joseph Mault’s Strange Kindness, which won this year’s David Kleiler Memorial Award for Best New England Film. An artist and music video director who has worked with the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Armand Hammer, Mault spent many years working in galleries in Brooklyn, but when it came time to craft his feature directorial debut he found himself returning to his home state. “It was always going to be Cape Cod,” Mault reflects on the origin of the project. “There’s a lot of little subtext things in the film about empty homes, and just that weirdness of driving around on Cape in the winter.”
The film certainly reflects that feeling of offseason unease, its characters adrift in a sort of liminal fog. The film centers on Chris (Deirdre Madigan), an older woman battling cancer who awakens one morning to discover a wounded young gunman (Michal Vondel) sheltering himself in her house. This is no standard home invasion thriller, however: rather than either panicking or turning the tables, Chris calmly tends to her house guest, affording him a peculiar sort of comfort as he bleeds out. “Chris, in a lot of ways, is sort of like the ideal,” says Leanne McLaughlin, who co-produced the film in addition to playing Chris’s niece, Rose, “That [lack of] judgment is the biggest characteristic that everybody else is on their journey to becoming.”
Chris’s unflappability, we eventually learn, stems from her stint as a war photographer in Vietnam. For this, Mault was inspired by stories and images of young, female photographers who were indeed thrown into combat. “Some of these women were, like, twenty,” Mault recalls, “Decked out in airborne gear, getting thrown out of planes and parachuting. Some of the photos that these women took were in the middle of gunfire– they’re completely in the shit.” Mault also drew inspiration from more esoteric sources. “Since college, I had been screwing around with this idea [from] a feminist writing from the ’70s that Medusa is a feminist icon,” Mault explains, “I was obsessed with photography, conceptually, and I love the idea that Medusa not only would be this icon, but she would be a photographer, and necessarily would be a woman.” When Chris poses the bloodied young man for a photograph in an oddly tranquil scene, it’s difficult not to sense that she’s capturing his soul in some indefinable way.
Much of the atmosphere of this “dark, droning narrative,” as Mault puts it, is conveyed by the eerie score, which Mault composed and performed himself on the shakuhachi (a traditional bamboo flute). Mault was inspired by Canadian ambient musician Tim Hecker, whose albums Konoyo and Anoyo both prominently feature the instrument. “The breath is very present in it,” Mault says of the instrument’s mystique, “You’re very aware of the person’s lungs while you’re listening to it.” To preserve the authenticity, Mault crafted several flutes himself (“If you go back to those stalks of bamboo [in the film], some of them are cut down, because they’re the flutes that I made”) and spent the better part of a month recording in multiple layers. “I definitely had some wellness checks from my friends,” Mault laughs, “They were like, ‘There’s a lot of flutes, and it doesn’t really seem like you’ve left the house in a couple days. How are you doing, buddy?’”
Strange Kindness is the first in what Mault and McLaughlin hope will eventually be a loose trilogy of thematically connected films. “We were super fortunate,” McLaughlin reflects on the way in which Strange Kindness came together, “We had that 10-person on-set crew with us. We all live, for the most part, on the Cape together, and we’re really trying to [shoot the next film] the same way that we did it last time.” The pair plans on shooting the next film in the fall, and the third sometime in early 2025.
For now, the film ends, fittingly, on an ambiguous note, with most of its characters at something of a crossroads. McLaughlin sees in the ending a certain degree of, if not closure, than at least destiny. “The film at the end, for me, feels like there’s a sense of coming home, that everybody’s there together, and all the pieces are back together,” she muses, “At the end they’re all brought back to that place of togetherness, which I don’t think is comfort necessarily, but it is togetherness.” Mault, for his part, prefers to let the film speak for itself. “I think I’m most cautious about saying too much,” he explains. “I like when characters say too much… because some people talk like that. I talk like that. But I don’t want the film to do that. I don’t want the film to tell you everything that’s going to happen. I’d rather it be kind of a dream. Ideally, you’re thinking about it the next day a little bit.”
Strange Kindness
2024
dir. Joseph Mault
90 min.
Part of the 2024 Boston Underground Film Festival – click here to catch up with the rest of the Hassle’s BUFF coverage!
