Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring Emma Stone and William Dafoe
Released on 28th June 2024

Reviewed by Nick Daly

Director Yorgos Lanthimos shook up cinema back in 2009 with Dogtooth, a film so confronting and deranged it instigated an entire film movement called the “Greek Weird Wave”. Since then, the director has miraculously become the toast of Tinseltown, with this year’s Poor Things being his most accessible and crowd-pleasing work to date. Close your eyes. If you listen closely, you can hear the faint cries of the arthouse crowd mourning another European auteur lost to Hollywood. Lanthimos must’ve heard them, because a mere few months later he’s responded with a film like Kinds of Kindness.

Kinds of Kindness contains many elements of Poor Things – Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley – but it’s an entirely different compound. Co-writer Efthimis Filippou appears to be the main element responsible for this shift. A longtime collaborator of Lanthimos early in his career, he’s brought back other aspects from the director’s past too. Gone are the lavish costume designs and set pieces of Poor Things and The Favourite (2018), replaced with the more contemporary, sterile environments of The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017).

Coming straight from the Oscar-winning aesthetic of Poor Things, it’s difficult to shake off Kind of Kindness feeling a bit like a low-budget, after-school project. Its mash-up of ideas, reusing of actors and hasty release so soon after the director’s biggest hit makes the film seem like a revolt to his mainstream success. “You’re a Yorgos Lanthimos fan now, are you?” The director asks. “We’ll see about that.”

Kinds of Kindness comes in the form of a “triptych fable” – a trio of individual but thematically-connected stories, each one as bizarre as the last. Each story also contains the same set of actors in different roles, which, if you don’t get anything else out of the film, is at least a nice showreel for the range of each actor. In the first story, a man attempts to escape a predetermined life set out by his boss. In the second, a policeman questions his wife’s strange demeanour after she returns home from being lost at sea. While in the third, a cult member searches for a specific individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.

While all distinct in their narrative, power dynamics within relationships appears to be a running theme throughout, whether in the context of a workplace, a marriage or a religious community. Lanthimos has always has a preoccupation with the absurd and complex nature of human behaviour. Dogtooth, after all, is a social satire on the lengths parents will go to control their children. Kinds of Kindness continues this fixation. In each segment, a character seems to lose their sense of self as they attempt to cling onto a toxic relationship that has come to define them. Any “kind” of “kindness” is only evident when it’s used as a tool for control by those in power. You didn’t think that film title was going to be literal, did you?

Yorgos Lanthimos has always revelled in toying with his audience. To view his work is to be perplexed, amused, unsettled and horrified, often all in the same scene. He not only wants you to gaze into the mirror, he wants to smash it and slice you with its fragments. This has now transcended into the trajectory of his career. Just when the director has seemingly found a place in the mainstream, he makes a violent U-turn back to his Greek roots. Still toying with his audience, I see.