One of the most meaningless films I’ve seen this year, Kane, directed by Blair Moore, is neither fully interested in entertaining the audience nor in fully exploring the mental disintegration of someone suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Kane seems to be a film that wants to create a mood and depends solely on the inherent cinematic value of topics like ‘multiple personalities.’ There have been so many exciting films where the disorder was used to heighten the suspense or give the film its rewatchability. Here, nothing of the sort happens. The drab narrative continues, and the revelation at the end doesn’t lend itself to any bigger idea that the film was trying to explore. It was mysterious, for mystery’s sake. There are some moments that arouse concern for the characters, but on the whole, Kane is a lukewarm crime thriller that uses known cinematic tropes to tell a rather dull tale.
Spoilers Ahead
Plot Synopsis: What Happens In The Film?
The film starts with Abe, the ‘main guy,’ who controls all the other personalities. His driver, Benny, had the task of driving him around, while Abe did the tasks he had assigned to his other personalities. There was the first personality, Richard, who handled Abe’s finances, and then there was the hitman, Kane, Abe’s second personality, who did all the dirty work. Abe was the kingpin, the mafia boss, who had everything under control when he had his medication with him. He used burner phones to assign things to his other personalities, and he was doing just fine until one day, he missed his medication and couldn’t manage the stress of his lifestyle. Benny is the last man alive after the violence that transpired that day, and the film unfolds through an interrogation being held by the police.
What Was In The Parcel?
The events shown on the screen might not be real or from a previous time period, but it looks like Abe was a happily married man. His wife, Sofia, and daughter, Mia, were unaware of what his line of work actually was. When Abe went out of the house that day, leaving the family behind, he had skipped a dose of his medication, and that meant he was bound to get disturbed. Richard, the finance manager of Abe’s psyche, was now vying for the top spot, trying to be the dominant personality, and Abe wasn’t going to let that happen. When Richard refused to listen to Abe’s instructions, Abe planned a hit on him. Who could be better for the job other than Kane himself? But Abe couldn’t just auto-suggest to himself so that the message would go to Kane. Kane had his own place, and he had to receive a parcel with the photograph of the person he was supposed to kill. Abe handed over a parcel to his bouncer, who knew exactly what he was supposed to do. He took the parcel to Kane’s address, and the message was received. Abe had to play out this charade for such communication. Kane saw the message and was hesitant to kill one of Abe’s personalities, but he was a monster, which Abe used, knowing fully well that he wouldn’t ever be able to say no to a hit job.
How Did Pam Find Out About Richard’s Affair?
Richard was in danger, but he wasn’t aware of it. The pressing matter for him was to visit Kelly, with whom he was cheating on his pregnant wife. Abe couldn’t be in two places at once, so it can be assumed that either Pam and Kelly were not real or that this affair was from some other time period that Abe was imagining. Whatever the case, what happened when Kane approached Richard seemed to be more important than what was actually happening on the day with Abe. Pam had seen Richard’s phone, which had a message from a woman named ‘Lollipop.’ She suspected that he was having an affair, and that’s why she had followed him. When she reached the parking lot, she didn’t know that Kane had already killed Richard. The mysterious thing for Kane was that when he saw Pam’s car, he approached it and saw that she had been shot.
Is Benny The Dominant Personality?
At the end of the day, Abe had a meeting with Frankie and Tony, two guys he had some beef with. That’s when the massacre happened. Abe killed Tony, Frankie, and all his gang members as well, leaving only Benny alive. Benny was telling all this to the police officers, who were monitoring him very closely. They had been following Abe and Benny all day, and perhaps they saw what Benny was hiding. Benny might’ve been the only real entity, while the others were the phantasmagoria of his mind. If he was not, then Abe was hallucinating about his marriage to Sofia.
Abe, Kane, and Richard were all hostile towards each other. If Kane’s phone call is to be believed, then Sofia was the woman on the other end, and she was alive and well. Abe had not married her; Kane had. Abe just thought that Sofia still lived in the house. When Frankie and Tony sent their guys to threaten Abe’s family, they found an empty house, implying that the event shown at the beginning of the film, where Abe was enjoying breakfast with his family, was his hallucination. The mystery of who killed Pam was solved when Kane was shown shooting her. What might have happened is that Abe would have had Pam’s photo in the parcel. This makes sense, as the only way to punish Richard was to take his family away from him. Richard couldn’t actually be killed, as that would mean self-harm.
The police were following Benny from the beginning, and they might have seen him chatting as if with an invisible fellow, and they might have an idea that Benny was the real murderer who was not owning up to his crimes. According to him, he was just an innocent driver who witnessed things from afar. The police, I think, also tried to get his other personalities out when they offered him the same brand of cigarette that Abe smoked. But it was highly unlikely that Benny would suddenly behave in a different manner, shifting his personality, as he had concocted a clear narrative in his mind as to how Abe was dead. Abe went berserk as Kane overtook him, and that’s why he killed all his foes and friends. Benny was left alive, and in his confession, he said that Kane had asked him to shoot. He was suicidal in a sense and on a killing spree at the same time. He might have remembered how he had shot Pam, and that just sparked a killing streak in him. Benny had to shoot, and he killed Kane. All the grand stories could be hiding the simple fact that Benny was unable to process his crimes, and hence, he had to concoct such elaborate tales. Perhaps he was getting better as now he had gotten rid of his multiple personalities, but the ending could also mean that he had finally gone insane and he would remain trapped in this story, thinking himself to have worked for some mafia boss named Abe.
