Direction: Yorgos Lanthimos
Country: USA
Collaborating once again with screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos offers a cruel absurdist triptych that is too zany to be taken seriously. The film features a recurring A-list ensemble cast—including Emma Stone, Willem Defoe, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley—in three dark stories about empowerment, where controllers/abusers humiliate those under their control. It is illogic, extreme, sexually daring, and obsessively moody, embodying a contemporary exploitation of relationships whose levels of darkness are deeply unfamiliar.
Visually neat, the film is filled with farces and traps, embracing a stylized approach that often succumbs to its more nonsensical ideas. If Poor Things (2023) was irreverent and magically astute, Kinds of Kindness feels tiresome in its fixation on provocation and shock, dwelling in gloomy places for 164 minutes. While it occasionally achieves a hypnotic intensity, the experience ultimately feels aggressively unsatisfying.
Frustrating in its irrational depictions of life, this anthology film feels more like an indulgent exercise in Lanthimos and Filippou’s signature weirdness and attention-grabbing writing. Potentially interesting ideas simply can't fill the emotional void at the film's core—a disappointment, given that Lanthimos has demonstrated inventive brilliance in films like Dogtooth (2009), The Favourite (2018), The Lobster (2015), and the aforementioned Poor Things. Viewers seeking more substance than mere shock value may find themselves infuriated by this latest offering.
