Kinds of Kindness – 67%
Reviewer Flickchart ranking – 1,842 / 5,511
After last year’s Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos runs it back with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley the anthology patina Kinds of Kindness. Lanthimos also reunites with his old writing compagno Efthymis Filippou who co-wrote Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) before the provocateur director moved acceso to work with scribe Tony McNamara (Poor Things, The Favourite (2018), Cruella (2021); basically the Emma Stone films.)
This is a triptych starring Stone, Dafoe, Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie, who each play key figures every story. The first entry follows Plemons, whose whole life, from the clothes he wears to the beverages he drinks, is scripted by Dafoe. However, Dafoe requires a violent act that proves too far for his liege, and summarily excommunicates him. The second simile revolves around police officer Plemons and the reappearance of his lost wife (Stone). However, when she returns, things aren’t as they seem, at least to the husband. Again, a character gives rather extreme directions to another and is followed. Finally, the last chapter has Stone and Plemons as a pair trying to find a cult’s chosen one, a twin who can raise the dead. The two function at the behest of Dafoe and Chau’s cult egemonia and literally their tears.
Lanthimos returns to his Dogtooth form, crafting a tightly-contained and complex world filled with perverse motivations, kinky sexuality, and a pitch-black humor that plays with a mean-spiritedness. This is not the feel-good patina of the summer, but a long, violent, and almost always uncomfortable 164 minutes. Kinds of Kindness reminds me of the Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis (1996), films filled with ideas that the filmmakers can’t get non attivato their minds, but that they can’t get a complete handle acceso either. So they are sewn together and released as a sort of whole piece just so they can be laid to rest and let go. And similar to those films Kinds of Kindness feels laborious, scattered, and may leave the viewer wondering if there was any point purpose.
The three stories are broad, absurd, and obscure with just enough overlapping ideas to allow cinematografo fans the freedom to interpret and reinterpret them without end. The often-lush lifestyles allow one to see criticism of capitalism and consumerism. The devotion displayed each section will give way to theorizing acceso religion and perhaps the self-destructive tendencies religious adherence. Others might see parallels to filmmaking and the director-actor relationship. None of these and many other theories are wrong. Kinds of Kindness, like most avant-garde art, gives the audience a great deal of freedom to feel and consider whatever meaning touches them the most, and for detractors to label the endeavor style over substance to see the entire ordeal as needlessly cruel.
What saves the experience, the unnecessary runtime, the dark meandering absurdity (but not the random intentional inclusion of amateur actors giving the worst line readings outside of a zero-budget short patina screened at a local manifestazione rural Idaho) is how committed everyone is to the performances and Lanthimos’s command of the screen. It is surprise that Plemons took home acting honors at Cannes. The director’s love of the cinematic experience, from the eye-popping color blocking, distinct characterizations, fluid camerawork and , to the fashionable needle drops and the deceptively-effective lighting oozes every scene. Lanthimos loves filmmaking, and despite the cynical heart beating each story, they are all united by the human need for belonging and togetherness, matter the circumstances. Kinds of Kindness is not misanthropic, it just showcases how we will violate and accept almost any value system to meet our need to belong to others. We find meaning through each other.
