Just a matter of months after filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and actress Emma Stone dazzled audiences and Hollywood with the eye-popping, Oscar-winning Poor Things, they’re back with their next film.
And if you thought Poor Things pushed the envelope with its weird, gothic horniness, then Kinds of Kindness is about to knock your socks off with its depravity.
The movie is the latest in a line of challenging, polarising movies to premiere at Cannes Film Festival this year.
A triptych of three not-even-really vaguely connected stories – other than by its actors and uncomfortable material – Kinds of Kindness still has Lanthimos’ unmistakable pitch-black humour running through.
The first is about Robert (Jesse Plemons), a businessman who allows his boss (Willem Dafoe) to control every aspect of his life – up to an including attempting his request that he kill someone in a car crash.
In the second, Plemons is a police officer convinced that his wife Liz (Emma Stone), after her return from being lost at sea, is an imposter. He subsequently asks her to commit increasingly brutal and grotesque acts in a twisted test.
The final one sees Stone and Plemons as a committed cult members recruiting for a dangerously calm pair of leaders (Dafoe and Hong Chau) who run some sort of glorified sex compound, complete with a hot tub filled with their tears. As you would of course expect, they are on the hunt for a girl whose touch can raise the dead.
As bizarre as those concepts sound just with the roughest of details, they barely scratch the surface of the disturbing scenes with which Lanthimos tests both his actors and audience.
Simply put, Kinds of Kindness is not an enjoyable film. It’s even hard to like with its unrelentingly dark situations, which include rape, miscarriage, animal cruelty, fresh human organs and Stone chopping her finger off to serve to Plemons with roasted cauliflower.
The latter is of course so wild that it’s definitely played for comedy – as well as disbelief. There are also less upsetting but still shocking inclusions put in to break the tension and subvert audience expectations with a big ol’ belly laugh, as Lanthimos is so fond of doing.
In one such instance, while still waiting for his wife to be found at sea, police officer Daniel begs his partner and his wife (Mamoudou Athie and Margaret Qualley) to watch a home video with him after they come around for dinner. The couple exchange glances, clearly uncomfortable, and suggest it would be ‘awkward’. Then they relent in the face of Daniel’s misery, only for the home video to be of the four of them participating in an adventurous and lengthy group sex session.
Kinds of Kindness does not have the narrative cohesion of Poor Things with its lack of traditional single storyline.
Pacing is another sacrifice for the film’s decision to split into three. Much as it allows a choice of scenarios to fans to pick a favourite from, it also results in a 164-minute run-time. And you feel every minute of it.
Kinds of Kindness sees Lanthimos revelling in a return to his less mainstream filmmaking since he broke through with The Lobster in 2015 – and with panache. It will sharply divide its audience.
However, his audacity is admirable. And Kinds of Kindness is the kind of weird and wacky film we should celebrate being made, even if it’s not for the faint of heart. Or necessarily a wide audience.
Kinds of Kindness is released in select US cinemas on June 21, and in the UK on June 28.
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