The story’s fixed pivot is an awkward, internet-engineered date between Carl and Abby, a gabby trickster with designs on his valuables, which goes from stilted to sinister with the over-addition of alcohol. Or does he? From this grim introduction, Jones’ script spirals clockwise and anti-clockwise by turns, deliberately muddying the temporality of the film when certain events happened, moreover, becomes a less crucial question than whether they happened at all. Meanwhile, it’s hard not to detect a wily dash of “Psycho” in Jones’s repeatedly splintered, refracted mystery, which begins with protagonist Carl, a solitary sadsack not long out of prison, waking in his dingy apartment to signs of a struggle he cannot recall, before discovering the murdered body of a young woman, Abby (Sinead Matthews, brashly endearing), in the bathroom.
The presence of Toby Jones, as quietly panicked and eerily shambling here as in Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio,” underlines the comparison.
(Even the eye-wateringly patterned shirt our protagonist wears for a critical portion of proceedings has a faded sense of Swinging London to it.) But it’s the structure and tenor of the narrative itself, with its mix of circuitous repetition, elusive suggestion and hard culs-de-sac, that call to mind Joseph Losey in one of his more experimental moods - and in turn Peter Strickland, the contemporary British filmmaker most in thrall to that particular avant-garde phase. Though it’s set in a present day complete with with cellphone-dependent plot points, nearly everything else about “Kaleidoscope” seems painstakingly designed to evoke a late 1960s strain of semi-esoteric British cinema: from the sparse, glassy strains of Mike Prestwood Smith’s score, to the brutalist architecture of the east London council estate that houses the action, to the sagging, peeling mid-century modernism - in soiled shades of tea and ale - that dominates Adrian Smith’s fine production design.
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