Kinds of Kindness review

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film is perhaps the most idiosyncratic yet, but it lacks the jocular protagonist that we had from Poor Things.

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness (Source IMDb).

Kinds of Kindness has more quirk than any of Lanthimos' films to date. With a fairly modest budget of $15 million, a pretty star-studded cast, and a best actor award from Cannes for Jesse Plemons (which is unquestionably deserved), this film should have taken audiences by storm more than the director's last epic Poor Things (Lanthimos, 2023). I was certainly excited to feel uncomfortable, morally confused, and ontologically puzzled; a small collection of the many things I feel when watching a Lanthimos film. Instead, it seems that Lanthimos has chosen eccentricity in the plot instead of in the style as he is more known to do.

Kinds of Kindness is broken up into three parts, containing all the same lead actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau. Each story contains all the unusual elements you would expect to see from Lanthimos; atypical ways of speaking, fantastical aesthetics, and pessimistic themes such as sycophancy towards successful figures, sexual violence, and paranoia. Despite all this, any sort of coherence between the three stories is non-existent, leaving audiences confused instead of emotionally fulfilled.

The characters are all played with sardonic brilliance, most notably by Plemons, who finally got to show off after playing the psychopath character in so many of his recent films. Stone also flourished with her emotional face, always displaying her characters' feelings unambiguously as she did with the credulous Bella Baxter in Poor Things. But aside from this, there was nothing particularly special about the characters.

As you would expect from a Lanthimos film, the cinematography and sound work gorgeously well together, the delicate score written by Jerskin Fendrix, who is beginning to become a recurring member of the Lanthimos oeuvre. The three font colours of the film red, blue, and yellow work efficiently to give the film a unique image, something you might resonate with the film now despite them being the primary colours you learn in infant school.

However, the thing turning this talented piece of art into a two-hour and forty-four-minute slog is the dilapidated plot. The three individual stories contain no world-building and therefore no context to what is going on, and what the characters' dilemmas are. As an audience member you are completely expected to guess, which is not often opposed, except in this scenario where you might find it difficult to even guess and instead leave the cinema feeling like a first act was cut out of every story. Ultimately, it is clear that Kinds of Kindness came from Lanthimos' imagination, perhaps so dramatically so that he may be the only one to understand it.