Kefi, 2026.
Directed by Saito Kisin.
Starring Takada Riho, Kaiya Tone, Iriki Mari, Kato Konatsu.
SYNOPSIS:
The eldest serves an alien, the middle one kidnaps and dates in dreams, and the youngest cheats. Just another day for three sisters reunited after their father’s death.
What does it mean to be weird in film? Everything Everywhere All at Once features characters beating each other up with dildos. Yet at its core, the film explores profound ideas about the mother-daughter relationship and finding meaning in ordinary life. Simply put, the weirdness serves as a vessel through which its central themes can truly shine. Kefi, the directorial debut of Kisin Saito, strives to be a bizarre journey about three daughters overcoming the loss of their father. Instead, it becomes a strange and ultimately somewhat meaningless experience.
Told through a series of chapters, the film features actual aliens, body-swapping drugs, dream dates, and animatronic dinosaurs. On paper, these ideas could be interesting. However, when digging beneath the surface, I struggle to comprehend what Saito is trying to convey. I have no issue with the inclusion of fantastical concepts such as aliens and body-swapping drugs. Yet these concepts never build towards a larger thematic revelation. Instead, it comes across as weird for weird’s sake. Which, by the time the credits rolled, left me feeling deeply cold.
One scene sees a woman randomly appear in someone’s home, scream, and then promptly pass out, leading to one of the most bizarrely disgusting moments I have seen in a film all year. The scene would not be an issue if it built towards something meaningful, but as previously stated, it doesn’t. What doesn’t help is that the characters themselves are fairly hollow. Kyo serves the aliens, yet she shares only a single scene with them and is introduced in a particularly bizarre manner. Later, she uses the body-swap drug to weirdly make love to herself in a man’s body.
The middle child, Asumi, appears to kidnap people who resemble her ex-boyfriend and then date them within their dreams. However, her latest victim is her younger sister Kino’s boyfriend. Yet Kino, oddly and out of nowhere, cheats on her boyfriend with a stranger. All of these aspects combined create characters who are deeply unlikeable and hollow. The only genuinely positive aspects of the film are its cinematography and soundtrack. They maintain a sense of visual and auditory interest even when the narrative itself struggles to do so.
Kefi is simply a bad film. There are interesting ideas scattered throughout, but the narrative is too hollow to do anything meaningful with them. I never felt that the film had anything substantial to say thematically, and worse still, it is weird purely for the sake of being weird. Even now, I cannot tell you why the aliens are in the film, as they contribute virtually nothing to the story.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Robert Ewing
