Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to making completely weird movies with Kinds of Kindness—which is perhaps his most bizarre movie yet, and this is the guy who made The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
The film is told in three parts, with the same cast playing different roles—and the title is a bit on the sarcastic side: Each of the stories focuses on toxic relationships, the sometimes-insatiable need to be wanted, mental and physical abuse, and even allegiance to a religion or cult. It’s a real party!
Performers including Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Willem Dafoe deliver work that is oddly stripped of most emotion, resulting in flat line readings that viewers could mistake for bad acting—if they weren’t in on the joke. This is a difficult way to deliver a script, but the cast delivers it admirably, and the moments that do contain heightened emotion really stand out.
Plemons is especially good in the roles of an extremely needy employee, an abusive husband, and a really dull husband. Despite the sometimes (intentionally) stilted line deliveries, he shows a wide range, with each character being distinctive.
Dafoe is also very good as a boss who goes from complete kindness to vicious asshole in an instant. Stone delivers perhaps her scariest work to date as a mysterious wife and a deranged cult member who can dance like nobody is watching.
I can’t say that I enjoyed the picture all that much, but I did admire it, and it gave me plenty to think about afterward. It’s not always an exhilarating watch, but when moments hit, they hit hard, and its sense of adventure had me quite captivated at times. Kinds of Kindness is a somewhat successful attempt in experimental moviemaking.
Kinds of Kindness is streaming on Hulu and available for purchase on other platforms.
