Film Review - Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos's darkly comic anthology of absurdist cruelty and extreme devotion will doubtless prove divisive
Yorgos Lanthimos continues to be a singular force in cinema, proving brilliant and divisive in equal measure, with Kinds of Kindness. Some people will absolutely detest this film. Others will be amused by the arguably misanthropic, arguably cathartic dark comedy inherent throughout. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you’re better off avoiding this. Although I didn’t care for it as much as some of Lanthimos’s other works, Kinds of Kindness is still a bracing, consistently absorbing experience.
The plot is an anthology of three peculiar tales, each starring the same main performers: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Margaret Qualley. In the first, an indecisive man refuses an immoral instruction from his ludicrously controlling boss (who lists, daily, what he should do, eat, read, when he should have sex, and so forth). In the second, a policeman believes his recently missing, now rescued marine biologist wife is an imposter. In the third, a cult searches for a mysterious woman they believe can raise the dead.
Recurring motifs include diet, types of food (especially chocolate and steak), drugging people, coercive control, characters trying to prove their love for abusers, sex, miscarriages, hospitals, and shockingly unpleasant deaths. All this is coated in a baffling absurdism that interrogates the nature of delusion, control, extreme cruelty, and extreme devotion. Some of the cast play radically different characters each time, but some (such as Dafoe) play very similar characters, with Lanthimos deftly shuffling his acting deck whilst also rigging it.
Perhaps some will emerge with a shrug, considering it much ado about nothing, but there’s no doubting the quality of the performances. Stone and Dafoe are on typically fearless form, with the always excellent Plemons proving great in something approaching a leading role (in other films, he’s normally relegated to the supporting cast). Directorially, Lanthimos is on more restrained form here, compared with the flamboyance of Poor Things (2023) and its overabundance of his trademark fish-eye lens. There’s some of that here too, but it doesn’t become anything like as distracting.
There’s an obvious comparison to ensemble multiplot films by Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson; Short Cuts (1993) and Magnolia (1999), for instance. But unlike those, this doesn’t feature the three plots intercut. Rather, they play out one after another (a wise choice, considering Lanthimos reuses the same cast). This is also a stranger, slightly more dystopian film. There’s a sense throughout, especially with cryptic references to water in the third tale, that this may be set a little into the future. Tonally, I found the film had more in common with the works of Luis Buñuel, given some of the surreal flights of fancy (I suspect the conclusion of at least one of the stories is a delusional fantasy).
At an arguably overlong 165 minutes, Kinds of Kindness at times tested my patience. Still, I found it a compelling, sometimes shocking film that thematically recalls earlier Lanthimos works like Dogtooth (2009). Whether it actually has anything of substance to say about the subjects it raises will doubtless get cineastes stroking their chins. However, to those more inclined to mainstream entertainment, it will probably come off as remorselessly unpleasant. I daresay that’s exactly what Lanthimos intended.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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