Where Is Kyra? (2018)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A better title for this film might be "The Lower Depths," that recalls the nineteenth-century naturalism of downtrodden members of the working class. It might also be placed in the category of "kitchen sink" drama that depicts the angst of struggling blue collar workers in Great Britain in the 1950s. But in this apparently dark and dreary drama, the filmmakers oddly seem to be making a stab a comedy as well. Because the film focuses on the travails of a woman and moves from the tragic to the tragi-comic to the farcical style, it might be best termed a "broad" comedy.The focus of the film is a down-and-out woman in Brooklyn named Kyra (Michelle Pfeiffer) whose hardscrabble life is on lurid display. The film begins with Kyra assisting her elderly mother, who dies early in the film. Kyra is broke and unable to find a job. At an interview for a clerical job, she knocks over a plant, and the body language of the employer indicates clearly that she will not be landing the job. The film pointedly addresses how incompetent Krya is in virtually everything.Kyra is so desperate that she begins the charade of dressing up like her mother and cashing her mother's pension checks at the bank, long after the mother's death. Kyra's lover is a man she met in bar: Doug (Kiefer Sutherland), who is a driver who has just gotten his life back together, is appalled that Kyra has committed fraud. But Doug's warning does not seem to register with Kyra.The production values of this film were uneven. The lighting is much too dark and blurry. The pacing is laboriously slow. At one point, Kyra laments that "nothing you worked for is working." That same adage could be applied to this film until a pivotal moment where the style shifts from grim realism to comedy. The police are now onto Kyra's scam, but she is determined that she is going to outfox them. Throughout the film, it is clear that Kyra cannot do anything right, yet at the end, she tries to pull of an amazing stunt and even enlists her loser boyfriend to participate in the charade. If you want to see how all of this turns out, be sure to check the film out and discover how kitchen sink drama can be instantly transformed into broad comedy.

The lighting in this movie is so horrible that all you see are basically the character's silhouettes you never get to see much of their faces, which keeps us at arms length from them, missing facial expressions which is half of acting. The most frustrating movie to watch. And painfully slow. What a waste of Pfeiffer's talent. Such a crime, her most powerful scene in the movie, we cannot see anything of her except an outline. There are maybe two scenes in this whole movie where you can actually see their faces. This director should be banned from making movies with major talent, He wastes our time and theirs.

I've watched the trailer, because Michelle Pfeiffer is one of my favorite actresses. And then I heard the voice of Kiefer Sutherland. Why doesn't he use his vocal cords? What he does when he speaks cannot even be called whispering. He does the same terrible thing in Designated Survivor. Is this becoming a trend, because Gillian Anderson also does not use her vocal cords in the 3rd Season of The Fall. After just half of the first episode of The fall Season 3 I stopped watching. The way these actors talk without using their vocal cords is excruciatingly irritating. Isn't there one director who will scream at Sutherland and Anderson: "Why don't you use your vocal cords? People can't hear you!"

I was really excited to see Michelle Pfeiffer, and didn't read any reviews before I watched this. It was very slow, the music hurt my ears, and the story was lacking so much. Nice to see Keifer Sutherland as well. This movie was really disappointing, and boring. The entire story is about a woman who loses her mother, struggles financially so she poses as her dead mother to cash pension checks, and then gets caught by police. I'm not an actor, maybe when you are out of the business for awhile you have to take what you can get to work. Maybe that is the case with this. I hate to be negative but I wished I knew how bad it was before I wasted two hours.