VERDICT: Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite with ‘Poor Things’ director Yorgos Lanthimos for this slight but fun triple-decker sandwich of macabre absurdism.
Still basking in the universal acclaim and Oscar-winning glory of Poor Things (2023), Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgis Lanthimos are already back on the festival circuit with their next collaborative project, Kinds of Kindness.
A triptych of twisted tales, each featuring the same core cast in different roles, this darkly funny Cannes competition entry returns Lanthimos to writer-director mode after two big adaptation projects, working again with his former co-writer Efthimis Filippou for the first time since The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).
Kinds of Kindness is essentially classic Lanthimos, an English-language throwback to the full-blooded macabre absurdism of his time as a figurehead of the Greek “Weird Wave” movement. He filmed this anthology project while extensive post-production work on Poor Things was still underway, working with a smaller team in a more indie mode.
The New Orleans shoot took just nine weeks, quite a feat given that it produced three mid-length mini-movies. Jesse Plemens, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn share recurring acting credits alongside Stone and Dafoe.
That said, anyone expecting the big laughs, opulent visuals, and formal literary games of Poor Things may be disappointed by this latest mischievous missive from the Lanthimos Cinematic Universe. Kinds of Kindness is lighter on jokes and visual brio than many of the director’s previous films, with an overlong runtime that weakens the twist-heavy tension and punchy rhythm of having three back-to-back stories.
Despite a solid-gold cast and some deliciously bizarre fairy-tale plots, it still plays more like a fun personal stop-gap project than a major career step. His work is consistently more interesting and imaginative than most European filmmakers, but this is still Lanthimos Light.
In the opening chapter, Plemens plays Robert, an office worker in a nameless US city who is plunged into anguish following a fairly minor traffic accident. It soon emerges that he had orders to kill the other driver from his Machiavellian boss Raymond (Dafoe), a saturnine svengali who exerts a pathological degree of control over all aspects of Robert’s schedule, diet, reading habits, relationship, and sex life.
Rebelling against Raymond’s sinister power games proves costly for Robert, losing his job, wife, and sense of purpose. A budding new relationship with Rita (Stone) seems to offer a potential fresh start, but ultimately both are caught up in the same spider’s web of malign manipulation, emotionally needy souls willing to commit random acts of violence in return for validation.
In the middle story, and weakest of the three, police officer Daniel (Plemens) appears to be heading for a psychotic breakdown after his marine biologist wife Liz (Stone) goes missing for weeks during a disastrous sea voyage.
One of his coping mechanisms is rewatching group sex tapes that the pair shot with their friends, which makes for an awkwardly hilarious dinner party scene. Mercifully, Liz does return, but her habits and tastes have changed so much that Daniel becomes convinced she is some kind of sinister doppelganger. Their escalating battle of truth or dare culminates in cannibalism, self-mutilation, and shock revelation.
For the final part of the triptych, Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemens) are members of a New Age cult who race from town to town in a high-speed sports car seeking a mythical woman with the power to raise the dead, a messianic figure foretold in their wacky but fastidiously detailed belief system.
Strict rules ban contact with “contaminated” body fluid outside the cult’s luxurious mansion base, which means members can only have sex with the group’s creepy polyamorous leaders, Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau). Though she is barred from visiting her estranged husband and daughter, Emily weakens and makes contact. She is denounced and rejected from the cult, but the pain of exile only makes her more determined to prove herself by locating the magically gifted woman, a bitter victory that backfires badly.
Any thematic threads running through Kinds of Kindness are slender, though the first and third chapters arguably mirror each other, perhaps as allegories of patriarchal power with the Plemens and Stone characters both in thrall to Dafoe’s sexually manipulative, guru-like, alpha-male father figure. The bond of trust between Lanthimos and his terrific cast brings conviction to even the most preposterous plot swerves here.
Now on her fourth collaboration with the director, Stone is reliably great, especially in the frenetic final chapter, when her elastic body language and manic energy kick into in high gear. A spartan score by Jerskin Fendrix, mostly piercing piano and stern choral interludes, expertly builds nerve-scraping tension.
All the same, Kind of Kindness still feels slightly judged against Lanthimos at his best. It lacks the simmering menace, painterly lushness, and eerily affectless deadpan dialogue that defined The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example.
Even ace Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who did such masterly, free-wheeling work on The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things, sticks to a more prosaic style here, mostly framing unremarkable interiors with a steady, naturalistic eye. Intermittent shifts into monochrome, usually dream sequences, add spare but pleasing textural variety.
