review: kinds of kindness

Making moves: Emma Stone in Kinds of Kindness

​Review: Kinds of Kindness

It’s strange to say that a director is ‘returning to form’ after their last movie - in this case, last year’s Poor Things - won prizes (Oscars included) across the globe. What I mean here is that Yourgos Lanthimos is returning to a kind of form that is reminiscent of the mood of his early films, such as Dogtooth. 

What does that even mean, though? Kinds of Kindness is an unsettling, experimental triptych that sees a return to writing with his collaborator Efthimis Filippou. All three stories share a cast, including Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Hong Chau, and Jesse Plemons. (One fun thing to note: much of the movie is shot in and around New Orleans, with scenes in The Windsor Court Hotel, and around the CBD). 

The basic plots are these: In part one, Plemons is in a subservient relationship to his boss, Defoe, who controls his every waking moment. In the second, Plemons is a cop whose wife (Stone) is rescued from a shipwreck but he’s convinced that she’s not the same person, and in the third, Plemons and Stone play members of a cult, led by Dafoe and Chau, who seek a divine being on Earth.

All of the worlds depicted are familiar yet deranged, with violence, delusion and perversion all simmering under a superficially mundane surface. Lanthimos drops clues and details that overlap or hint at connections - a character referred to as “R.M.F.”, a fascination with dogs, his trademark stylistic weirdness and a brutal dissection of power dynamics. 

The events on screen - some surreally beautiful, some viscerally depraved, some psychologically scarring - allow for a real spectrum of readings. Some have floated that each one represents a particular religion (Islam, Judaism, Christianity), and there are dozens of theories already abounding in film discussion threads. 

The Lanthimos hallmarks are all there, and if you’ve enjoyed his pre-Poor Things work, especially his earlier Greek movies, then you’ll find lots to chew over here. Characters all speak in that clipped, removed way, and instances of socially unusual behaviour are mainly just accepted by everyone at face value. 

Although the photographic flourishes of Poor Things and The Favourite aren’t to be found, it’s nevertheless a provocative and unhinged film in other ways. People lose sense of themselves, whether through self delusion or control by others, and it can feel disorienting to watch, the sense of things only coming together with pieces that you’re not even sure are part of the same puzzle.

The best summary of how the director sees humanity comes by extrapolating the lines of the opening song, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by The Eurythmics: Some people want to use you. Some people want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. And some of them? Some of them...want to be abused. (PO)