From left, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in “Kinds of Kindness.” Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures via TNS
Yorgos Lanthimos has become the modern-day face of the commercial avant-garde, an oxymoron as self-contradicting as many of his films.
The director’s cult-like fanbase garnered from his early indie works like “Dogtooth” or “The Lobster” was firmly diluted by mainstream acclaim after his 2023 release “Poor Things,” a film that was nominated for several categories at the Oscars and picked up wins in more places than expected, including the Best Actress accolade for Emma Stone’s critically acclaimed performance as protagonist Bella Baxter.
Lanthimos’ signature style — marked by warping wide lenses, extraneous sexual references, gore and oddball characters who poke fun at the decorum of a supposedly civil society — continues to draw in crowds, whether they leave the theater gleefully amused or disappointingly bemused. Unfortunately, his latest feature “Kinds of Kindness” is likely to induce the latter outcome.
“Kinds of Kindness” features a familiar cast of names — including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, all returnees from “Poor Things” and various other projects — as well as fan-favorite Jesse Plemons (“Civil War”), who makes his debut in the Lanthimos-verse.
The film is split into three distinct shorter films, all of which feature this core cast, though performers portray different characters in the film’s separate worlds.
In usual Lanthimos fashion, it’s difficult to put into words what the plot of these shorts actually are.
Loosely, the first film follows a man (Plemons), who works for a corporate boss (Defoe) who controls every aspect of his life and even orders him to stage a car accident to kill another man. The second film also centers around Plemons, but this time he is a police officer who notices his wife (Stone) acting peculiar after being rescued from a mysterious island expedition. The third film stars Stone as a member of a cult that seeks to find a woman capable of reviving the dead.
The issue with many of Lanthimos’ films is not the claim they’re too complex and “you just don’t get it,” a common dismissal amongst fans who criticize a lack of media literacy for his poorer reviews. Rather, it’s the opposite: the meaning baked into his films is easily identifiable by anyone who paid attention in 10th-grade English class, and the shock value of his R-rated indulgence continues to be less and less shocking to a modern-day audience that is already over-exposed to gore and sex in indie films.
Such is the case in “Kinds of Kindness.” The message of demonstrating how far people will go to remain accepted among their social groups while simultaneously ostracizing themselves from the standards of a “sane” society is easily gleaned within the first few minutes of each short story, and then subsequently stretched out for almost an hour each without adding much new onto it.
Of course, other interpretations of the film are valid, but this one offers the most context clues, and other readings are too half-baked to take seriously.
There’s an argument to be made that each of the shorts touches on a different aspect of this need for acceptance, with the first critiquing the need for corporate approval, the second an examination of the American marital expectation and nuclear family and the third an admonishment of the unfair standards women must be held to in the workplace in order to live up to their male counterparts.
Still, these specific offshoots of the main point of “Kinds of Kindness” suffer from the same issue as the overall film. They offer a derivative platitude about the failures of societal structures and then spend the rest of their bloated runtime patting their audience on the head like a dog that’s just learned to sit, feeding them treats in the form of ostentatious absurdism.
For instance, Lanthimos chooses to sprinkle a heavy dose of a dissonant, clunky piano soundtrack over most of his sensationalist scenes, as if to hold a viewer’s hand and say, “OK, now the piano means this isn’t supposed to be taken ironically, and this is actually really bad. Pay attention now.”
“Kinds of Kindness” likely won’t move the needle much for Lanthimos’ fanbase, as it’s mostly what is to be expected of him at this point. Therein lies the problem: Lanthimos is often praised for being wildly original, with no film like the last, yet “Kinds of Kindness” is wholly imitative of his prior works.
This fear of truly stepping out of line is exactly what holds Lanthimos back from being held in the same regard as the champions of surrealist filmmaking like David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky, both of whom he so desperately tries to be shoehorned in with.
Lanthimos’ supposedly shocking, salacious films always seem too airbrushed, seeking a wide, mainstream appeal, which is in direct contradiction to the intrinsic values of avant-garde cinema. As such, films like “Kinds of Kindness” end up feeling like vapid drivel and a distinct waste of nearly three hours.
Rating: 1.5/5
