Kinds of Kindness
U.S.A./U.K./Ireland 2024

Opening 4 Jul 2024

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writing credits: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou
Principal actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau

Yorgos Lanthimos films are never predictable. They feature great casts and are not easily confused with any other movie you’ve seen recently. They proceed dream-like in a world where the usual rules of human behavior are suspended.

Like Lanthimos’ previous film, Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness also features Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. (Stone won an Oscar for her role as woman with the brain of an infant in the body of an adult suicide victim.) Stone may be up for another Oscar, along with her costars, for this movie, which is actually three movies in one, clocking in at two hours and forty-five minutes long.

Stone along with Dafoe and co-stars Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau, all play roles that are wildly different. Stone, for example, plays a florist, a scientist, who may or may not have indulged in cannibalism while shipwrecked, and a wife and mother, who left her family to join a cult whose members drink only water that has been flavored with their leaders’ tears. Dafoe gets to play a concerned dad, a cult leader, and a hyper-controlling CEO. It looks like it must have been a fun movie to work on, each actor playing roles they’d unlikely to be offered—outside of dreams and/or science fiction.

Like the actors, Lanthimos, who wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou, probably also had fun, fashioning plot lines in which a husband concludes that his newly returned wife is in fact not his wife because her shoe size has changed and her preferences in bed now skew more towards BDSM. Plemons, a talented actor, is very convincing as the husband. He does an equally good job in the first story playing a corporate man who lets his boss dictate absolutely everything in his life including his clothes, diet, house, and wife.

So, while this movie was likely fun for the actors, writers, and writer/director, what about the audience? That answer is more equivocal. While the plot twists always surprise, they don’t always do so in ways that are pleasant. We see one character chopping off an appendage with a knife that maybe wasn’t sharp enough, that appendage after it has been severed along with the blood, a body being run over by a car—twice, and the bloody aftermath of another body going through a windshield.

Of course, this is pretty tame stuff compared the tally of injuries and deaths clocked in an average action film these days. But unlike Vin Diesel films, the average audience for a Lanthimos film is more art house than chop house. The violence is more realistic than stylized and as a result, more shocking and unpleasant. The length of the movie is also more punishing than pleasurable. It’s not clear why the three stories were put together other than perhaps to showcase the actors’ considerable range. Reflecting on the various plot strands, I can think only about the old song, “You Always Hurt the One You Love.”

Kinds of Kindness may still be a rewarding view for die-hard Lanthimos fans and the uninitiated as long as they understand that despite its title, they’ll be seeing something closer to Black Mirror than Apple TV’s Ted Lasso. There is no kindness here. (Julie Corwin)