NEXT OF KIN

When Linda inherits her mother’s sprawling retirement home in rural Australia, she returns to a place she hasn’t seen since childhood and discovers that the elderly residents have started dying with suspicious regularity. Then she finds her mother’s old diaries, which describe eerily similar deaths decades earlier. There are figures at windows, faucets that won’t stop running, footsteps in empty rooms and an enormous old house that seems determined to keep Linda from ever getting a decent night’s sleep.

NEXT OF KIN spends its first hour moving at the speed of a nightmare you can’t quite wake up from, then suddenly remembers it’s an Australian horror movie and all hell breaks loose. Director Tony Williams smothers the film in rain, shadows, long hallways and creeping dread, while Tangerine Dream veteran Klaus Schulze’s pulsing electronic score keeps the dread humming. Together they turn a retirement home into one of the great haunted spaces of ’80s horror without ever settling comfortably into a ghost story. Elegant, eccentric and quietly menacing, NEXT OF KIN keeps tightening the screws until its stately Gothic nightmare finally cracks open and something much wilder comes spilling out.