Kinds of Kindness
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Running time: 2hr44 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Emma Stone in Kinds of Kindness
The original title for Kinds of Kindness was And, and while I understand why the film's distributors ultimately baulked at that SEO nightmare, a part of me wishes they'd kept it: the latest from the currently indefatigable Yorgos Lanthimos is a film of conjunctions and prepositions, bridging story clauses that, cryptic on their own, are even more mysterious worked into a full sentence. Shuffle them around in your head and their cumulative meaning shifts, or strengthens, or breaks down entirely, as in a kind of mad-libs word game; the “and" of it all keeps the narrative connected, but not fixed in place. Kinds of Kindness, though? Finding any benevolent streak in this gleefully caustic comedy is its own sort of puzzle.
This is, if you hadn’t gathered, an anthology film, which is a tricky form to wrangle — calling to mind the literary difference between a great short story and a great short story collection. The best ones exceed the sum of their parts, fusing their separate tales into a larger mood, or vision, or line of inquiry; you feel immersed in one multifaceted imagination, not buffeted between disparate ones.
Kinds of Kindness qualifies as such, and not just because its three segments are set in the same featureless, freeze-dried stretch of Louisiana suburbia — close to New Orleans but a million miles from its jazzy, fizzy public image. Nor is it because a single elusive character drifts through all of them, hinting that this might be one solitary, albeit double- or triple-jointed, story after all, even as the principal cast members play different roles in each third. Rather, they’re bound by the highly particular sensibility of Lanthimos himself, returning to screenwriting (with longtime collaborator) Efthimis Filippou for the first time since 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. His violent, deadpan perversity saturates Kinds of Kindness like a fresh stab wound soaking through layers of clothing; by the end of it, you can just about taste the blood in your mouth too.
This might be bad news for those who only warmed to Lanthimos via the comparatively buoyant, baroque comedy of his last two films, The Favourite and Poor Things, both written by Tony McNamara. Closer to his Greek-language breakout films Dogooth and Alps, Kinds of Kindness sits at the chillier, more harshly absurdist end of the Lanthimometer, though its severity doesn’t come at the expense of playfulness, and there’s a gnarled heart nested in there if you care to see it. In the first tale, a milquetoast businessman (Jesse Plemons, deftly playing everyman cosiness against hollow froideur, and fully deserving of his Cannes Best Actor award) submits to the instructions of his charismatic boss (Willem Dafoe) in all facets of his life — from his work to his diet to his wife — only to rebel when told to run a man over with his car. In the second, Plemons plays a cop whose marine-biologist wife (Emma Stone) goes missing at sea; when she returns, he’s convinced she’s altered, and sets her an extreme test of devotion. The third sees Stone and Plemons operating as spiritual head-hunters for a sharkish cult leader (Dafoe, of course), their arrangement thrown off when Stone revisits her estranged husband (Joe Alwyn).
Described in tight little loglines, none of these sounds like much — so it is with short stories — though I’m not inclined to give away the film’s most peculiar left turns or most startling breaks in rhythm. There is, however, a strange, incremental power to this triptych of brutally sawn-off relationship studies, jabbing a little more insistently at our nerves and kinks each time it resets its scene. Kinds of Kindness never neatly announces a theme, but permits us plenty of room to consider human dynamics of control, dependence, loneliness and longing, and how these nasty, no-moral fables reflect (with a fair degree of funhouse-mirror distortion) our own more banal personal networks. Some critics reach for the word “surrealism” with Lanthimos, though that’s never really been his game. He prefers realism stripped of its everyday niceties, made alien by stray off-kilter details, like a familiar face with its features tilted just off-centre — or a sentence scrambled and shorn of some words, awaiting its connections, its inflections, its ands.
KINDS OF KINDNESS (2024) Written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou | Shot by Robbie Ryan | Edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis