Kin

In the summer of 2018, the cinematic landscape was a scorched-earth map of superhero dominance. We were right in the thick of the "everything must be a cinematic universe" gold rush. If a movie didn’t have a post-credits scene or a toy line, did it even exist? I watched Kin on a Tuesday evening while eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios that had gone slightly soggy because I got distracted by the opening credits’ font, and that mid-week slump vibe is exactly where this movie lives. It’s a strange, quiet, mid-budget anomaly that tried to build a franchise on a foundation of grit and alien plastic, only to be swallowed whole by the box office.

Directed by the Australian duo Josh and Jonathan Baker, Kin is an expansion of their 2014 short film Bag Man. It’s a fascinating, if lopsided, hybrid: half Dardenne-brothers-style social realism about the decaying American Rust Belt, and half "boy and his glowing gun" sci-fi adventure. It’s the kind of movie that feels like it was pitched as The Terminator meets Mud, but ended up as a very expensive pilot for a TV show that never got picked up.

Rust, Dust, and Laser Thrust

The story centers on Eli (Myles Truitt), a lonely kid scavenging for copper wire in abandoned Detroit buildings. He stumbles upon the aftermath of a futuristic skirmish and finds a weapon that looks like a cross between a minimalist sneaker and a handheld railgun. Shortly after, his older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor, who brought such a different energy to Midsommar) returns from prison with a massive debt to a local greasebag named Taylor, played by James Franco.

James Franco’s mullet is the scariest thing in the movie, looking like it was harvested from a 1980s wrestling magazine found in a damp basement. When a heist goes south and their father (Dennis Quaid, doing his best "gruff but disappointed dad" routine) is caught in the crossfire, the brothers hit the road. It’s a classic runaway story, but with a trunk containing a piece of hardware that can disintegrate a concrete wall.

What I find interesting about Kin in the context of the late 2010s is how much it resists being an action movie for the first hour. It spends an inordinate amount of time on the chemistry between the brothers. Myles Truitt is excellent here—he has a watchful, internal presence that keeps the movie grounded even when the plot starts leaning into the fantastical. Jack Reynor plays Jimmy as a lovable, desperate loser who keeps making every possible wrong decision, and you actually feel the weight of their precarious situation.

A Weapon of Mass Distraction

However, the "action" part of this action-sci-fi flick is where things get shaky. The gun itself is cool—it’s got haptic feedback, it transforms when Eli touches it, and the sound design makes every shot feel like a glitch in reality. But the movie is so stingy with its sci-fi elements that you start to wonder if the Baker brothers were embarrassed by them. For a $30 million movie, the scale feels remarkably small until the final fifteen minutes.

We eventually pick up a third passenger in Milly, played by Zoë Kravitz, who was just a year away from her Big Little Lies breakout. She’s great, as she always is, but the role is essentially "The Girl" who hangs out until the plot needs her to react to a laser blast. Meanwhile, we have these mysterious, helmeted figures—the "Cleaners"—tracking the weapon. They look like Daft Punk’s more aggressive cousins, and while their aesthetic is sleek, they feel like they’ve wandered in from a completely different movie.

The pacing is deliberate, bordering on sluggish. It’s the kind of contemporary filmmaking that prioritizes "atmosphere" over "momentum," which works if you’re a fan of the moody Mogwai soundtrack (which is, honestly, the best part of the film), but might frustrate you if you came for the explosions. The ending is less of a climax and more of a 102-minute LinkedIn invitation for a sequel, featuring a massive cameo that feels like a desperate attempt to signal a "wider world" that we’ll never actually see.

The Mystery of the Missing Audience

Why did Kin vanish? It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but it suffered from an identity crisis. In 2018, audiences wanted the full-tilt spectacle of Avengers: Infinity War or the high-concept tension of A Quiet Place. Kin sat in the middle—too indie for the blockbuster crowd and too sci-fi for the drama aficionados. It made just over $10 million globally, a certified disaster that effectively killed any hope of seeing what happens when those mysterious mercenaries finally catch up.

It’s a "what-if" movie. What if the mid-budget original sci-fi film could still thrive in theaters? The answer, unfortunately, was a resounding "only on streaming." Today, Kin feels like a proto-Netflix original that accidentally took a detour through a theatrical release. It’s a handsomely shot, well-acted curiosity that serves as a time capsule for that brief moment when studios were still trying to turn every indie short into a tentpole franchise.

If you’re in the mood for a road trip movie with a dash of "otherworldly tech" and you don't mind a story that essentially stops right when it gets going, it’s worth a look. Just don't expect a Part 2.

Ultimately, Kin is a victim of its own ambitions. It wants to be a gritty character study about brotherhood and the cycle of crime, but it’s anchored to a glowing plastic MacGuffin that belongs in a much louder film. It’s a well-made, moody piece of cinema that proves Myles Truitt is a star in the making, but it leaves the viewer feeling like they’ve only read the first three chapters of a very long book. It’s a relic of the pre-pandemic "franchise-starter" era that reminds me why sometimes, a short film is perfect just the way it is.