Cannes 2024: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Funky Triptych ‘Kinds of Kindness’
by Alex Billington
May 22, 2024
From the strange and wicked and peculiar mind of Greek mastermind Yorgos Lanthimos comes another disquieting new film that will disturb even more people. Only a few months after premiering Poor Things at the 2023 Venice Film Festival (here’s my review of that one), Lanthimos is back on the festival circuit with his next film titled Kinds of Kindness. It’s nearly three hours in total and instead being of one, long film it’s three different stories cut together into a triptych feature that plays more like a mashup of funky “Black Mirror” ideas than something more straightforward. As expected with Lanthimos, it’s proper mindfuckery of the highest order. Three weird stories that most probably won’t enjoy watching because they’re so strange and unsettling and don’t follow the typical cinematic narratives most are familiar with. In fact, I’d say Kinds of Kindness is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Twilight Zone. Sort of? Maybe? Many bizarre things happening in each of the stories that may or may not involve the supernatural. Or they are just about a bunch of crazy people.
Kinds of Kindness is the latest project written by Lanthimos’ fellow Greek collaborator Efthimis Filippou, who also wrote the screenplays for Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Nimic for the filmmaker before he went off to make a few films for Hollywood (The Favourite, Poor Things). If you’ve seen any of those previous films, you know he’s a weird guy who creates some super weird stories for the big screen. It’s honestly a bit of a challenge to make sense of the three mini-films in Kinds of Kindness without further analysis after. The main title isn’t much of a help either – they’re not really about kindness, or kind people, or different kinds of kindness that people can express. Instead, they are much darker stories about the the pursuit of love and the pursuit of power, and how desperate everyone is to be loved, and how they need to hold onto and stay close to power, because it gives them something. It provides them some comfort, some connection, something to stop them from being lonely. Together, Filippou & Lanthimos love to mess with viewer’s minds. The films are meant to make you go “huh?” as you try to decipher what just happened.
The greatest strength of Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness is the extraordinary cast that he has lined up to make his Twilight Zone believable: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie. Each of them appear as different characters in the three mini-films, giving excellent performances each and every time. It’s almost like watching Cloud Atlas, though the characters are not necessarily connected, and the performances are distinct for each role, not really linked by time & space. Though perhaps you never know? Maybe with repeat viewings and further analysis, it will be possible to find a connection between them? The character known as “R.M.F.” is a part of all three parts. Plemons is the standout in two of them, with Stone rocking the finale. Lanthimos has honed his directorial skills over so many films and become a true master of getting actors to act as perfectly weird and kooky as he needs to them to be for his stories. It’s uncanny. It’s inimitable. Watching them in these segments is the best part of Kinds of Kindness, even if it’s hard to understand just what the hell they’re all doing (and why).
This review isn’t meant to be my place to try to explain the three segments. As much as I enjoyed watching them, this isn’t one of my favorite Lanthimos films. It’s also been enjoyable to try to make sense of them, but I don’t ever feel the need to revisit this triptych ever again. I dig Lanthimos and I especially dig it when he fucks with our brains, but I don’t feel any more enlightened by nearly three hours of Kinds of Kindness. For those wonder what’s going on, this quote from Emma Stone from the Cannes press conference sheds some light on the stories: “These things that we need in the world, or we need to feel comfortable, are the choices that we make to put ourselves in these positions. There’s so much that she’s not in control of, and that she tried to be in control of… Out of context, it sounds insane! But you delude yourself into feeling like someone else is going to fix it for you, or that you need a figure to tell you what to do.” This isn’t any kindness I know of, but Lanthimos does seem to think this kind of power-play storytelling does make for interesting cinema. Whether or not each viewer will be into it is up to them. There’s only so much weird that we can all handle.
Alex’s Cannes 2024 Rating: 7 out of 10
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