‘Not everyone is cut out for everything...’
I’m a huge fan of Yorgos Lanthimos and I think there is a lot to be said for him following the huge success of Poor Things with this strange triptych fable that is hard to access and even harder to love. It’s the same kind of commitment to art over commerce that saw Scorsese follow Raging Bull with King of Comedy. This is probably Lanthimos’ least accessible film released at a time in which he has never been more popular and that audacity should be applauded. Unfortunately, Kinds of Kindness is also Lanthimos’ worst film…
The conceit here is that we have three stories all starring Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, but they play different characters in each chapter. The first story concerns a man paying dearly for an act of defiance, the middle section centres around a man grieving his wife, whilst the instalment is about erm… a sexual assault within a sex cult. I think. I’d started to lose the will to live a little by the time we finally reached the film’s bizarro conclusion.
It would be too far to say that Kinds of Kindness is a bad film, but it’s definitely a frustrating one. Lanthimos’ dark worldview and jet-black humour are present and correct but this time it feels like the audience is just as much the butt of the joke as the characters. More than any of his previous works, Kinds of Kindness feels more like a film made by Yorgos Lanthimos for Yorgos Lanthimos. Perhaps the words ‘pretentious’ and ‘self-indulgent’ would be a little harsh, the film feels almost wilfully esoteric, and while ambition should always be applauded in mainstream cinema (for that is the area where Lanthimos now resides whether he likes it or not) it mustn’t come at the expense of entertainment – especially in a film that is almost three hours long.
Kind of Kindness has some interesting moments, some transcendent moments even, but as with many anthology films, it is also uneven and tonally jarring – an admirable film but not one I will be revisiting any time soon.
