When one views the world through a fractured lens, frightening consequences can befall anyone who enters that person’s orbit. Kaleidoscope’s namesake novelty toy not only plays a figurative role in the film, serving as a metaphor for the shapeshifting nature of its protagonist’s warped reality, but it also has a literal part to play in his unfortunate history. Sad-sack ex-con Carl (Toby Jones) frequently returns to a vivid boyhood memory of marveling at the changing shapes and colors of a kaleidoscope given to him by his father (Karl Johnson), a man whose apparently violent death only heightened the bizarre dynamic between Carl and his overbearing mother (Anne Reid).
The unsettling maternal influence, rife with troubling manipulation that spills over into twisted incestual implications, inescapably recalls Psycho, especially when a frenzied murder gets thrown into the mix. Indeed, the entire film, in which a towering staircase is integral to the plot, harkens to Hitchcock’s influence. Despite a largely unexplained felonious past, Carl is making a go of it as a free man, developing a cordial relationship with his high-rise neighbor (Cecilia Noble) and working as a groundskeeper at a nearby assisted living facility. The shy, middle-aged British man even takes a stab at online dating, ultimately inviting the bawdy Abby (Sinead Williams) back to his flat, where an already intensely awkward date appears to take a tragic turn.
When Carl’s unwelcome mother shows up on his doorstep the following day, timelines crisscross and Carl has a hard time differentiating between his mother and Abby, the latter of whom he may or may not have strangled to death the night before. Director Rupert Jones (brother to the film’s principal actor, Toby) impressively stretches his shoestring budget, incorporating compellingly disorienting editing and crisp cinematography that provides a sense of claustrophobia both in its exterior shots of the uniform high-rise flats and its emphasis on dark shadows in interior spaces, which mirror the murky spots in Carl’s psyche. Toby Jones, an accomplished character actor, excels in this lead role, playing the addled Carl as both endearing and creepy in a film that refuses to offer the viewer definitive evidence about what is reality versus delusion until its closing minutes. Even then, Kaleidoscope is the type of film that almost demands a second viewing in order to make sense of its nonlinear fragments.
There’s inherent peril in hinging a film’s tension on the mental contortions of a troubled character’s unreliable perception. Indeed, there’s a sense of the filmmakers pulling the rug out from under viewers, but the film doesn’t simply cop out with a shocking twist. Instead, its disorienting turns interlock in such a way as to heighten the psychological impact on Carl’s troubled mind. Fueled by the strength of Jones’s dynamic performance, along with impeccable turns from the rest of the principal cast—Reid is chilling in as a manipulative, subtly prurient mother, and Williams’s Abby toes a precarious line between exuding empathy and cruelty—Kaleidoscope is a micro-budget gem that adds a decidedly 21st century bent to Hitchcockian suspense.
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