Kinds of Kindness
Take a look in advance
The latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Favourite) is a macabre absurdist triptych: three stories set in and around contemporary New Orleans. An office worker finally rebels against the intimidating tyranny his overbearing boss exercises over him. A police officer is alarmed when his wife, a marine biologist, returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, suspecting she has been replaced by a double. Two cultists search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Director Lanthimos makes use of each story in his...
The latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Favourite) is a macabre absurdist triptych: three stories set in and around contemporary New Orleans. An office worker finally rebels against the intimidating tyranny his overbearing boss exercises over him. A police officer is alarmed when his wife, a marine biologist, returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, suspecting she has been replaced by a double. Two cultists search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Director Lanthimos uses the same actors in each story, appearing in different roles. These actors, including Emma Stone, William Dafoe and Jesse Plemons, all sparkle in Lanthimos' amazing direction: in his world, everything is just strange enough to be funny, but also just real enough to be horrific. He creates an eerie world that looks like ours, but in reality is not.The black-comic sketches are dark - and disturbing.
As such, the title Kinds of Kindness could hardly be more ironic. As dark as Lanthimos' comedic, amusing side has always been, there are moments when the cruelty in this film becomes almost unbearable. Car accidents are one thing, but the recurring motif of wives being humiliated by their husbands is by no means a laughing matter.
Lanthimos co-wrote the script for this film with Efthymis Filippou, with whom he also wrote the screenplays for his earlier work Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011) The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017). Kinds of Kindness appears to be a foray into these earlier films with just as macabre, absurdist a parallel universe.