"KINDS OF KINDNESS" - REVIEW
There used to be an Athenian street food place in the Twin Cities called The Naughty Greek. That titled is now reserved for director Yorgos Lanthimos.
One of our most brazen and exciting current filmmakers for adults, Lanthimos is the director of last year’s Oscar-winning POOR THINGS, which garnered 11 nominations (including one for Best Director) and four wins, including Best Actress for Emma Stone in a perfect marriage of role and performer. It’s a performance for the ages, and the demented fairy tale they told was both salty and sweet, a raunchy confection laced with big ideas of control and liberation, delivered with absolute commitment by its performers and craftspeople, and the cinematic equivalent of gorging oneself on Portuguese custard tarts.
Six months later we have KINDS OF KINDNESS, a new Lanthimos creation (this time written by himself and his usual co-writer Efthimis Filippou), which feels like the aftermath of gorging on too many Portuguese custard tarts. Indeed, this movie flies in the face of all the momentum and goodwill built up by POOR THINGS. This is Lanthimos back in THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER-mode, and this new movie is all the “istics”: it’s artistic. It’s also nihilistic, fetishistic, hedonistic, solipsistic and sometimes just plain ic(k). As usual, his films live by clinical, distrubing, and absurd rules that are not explained, but are generally accepted by its characters as just the way things are, and about the role of fate in meting out consequences to those who push back, as well as consequences to those who play along.
Without giving much away, this dark comedy is a triptych, set in New Orleans, and each of its three stories are related only through A) themes of love and the desperation of toxic humans to control the flow of it, and B) a mysterious character named RMF. Aside from RMF (played by Yorgos Stefanakos), who appears as the same character in all three stories, each story shares the same actors playing different characters. POOR THINGS stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley return, and are joined by Jesse Plemons (who won Best Actor at Cannes, getting more screen time than he often does, and making the most of it), Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn (from Lanthimos’s THE FAVOURITE) and Hunter Schafer. All game performers, doing things that many actors are not able or willing to do, in a film made by a filmmaker who believes in the need to excavate the human soul by any means necessary to find the source of the rot. In this case, the source is found, and just left there.
Historically, a director who has a success can sometimes start to revel in that success and believe in their own legend, or tamper their tastes in an effort to be liked and garner more success. The best response to that is just to immediately make another movie, and to keep that original voice pure (in this case, puerile). It should be mentioned that this film was made while POOR THINGS was in post-production back in 2022, but I’m (mostly) glad that the success didn’t send anyone back to the editing room, or back to set for reshoots to make it more commercially appealing. If anything, KINDS OF KINDNESS has no problem whatsoever with not catering to anyone, which is admirable up to a point. While I admired the artistry and adventurousness, as well as its unique structure and repertory theatre inspiration, this takes a lot of time (almost three hours) to ultimately say very little, over and over again. Of the films Lanthimos has directed—which also include THE LOBSTER (my personal favorite) and DOGTOOTH—this one demands the most of its audience, and while it is filled with funny ideas, the reward is pretty paltry (an alternate title could be NOTHINGS OF NOTHINGNESS). That said, if you are a fan of his other films, you’ll likely be a fan of this one, too, and find much to admire if not exactly enjoy.
For all of KINDS OF KINDNESS’s willful strangeness, perhaps the strangest thing is to release it right in the middle of summer. As previously written, this has been a most unusual summer at the movies, but it’s so confounding that once again, it seems that Hollywood is playing Russian roulette with its own industry. How does something like HIT MAN, a genuine crowd-pleaser with a great director and a movie star on an exciting upward trajectory, get a near-exclusive streaming release and buried by Netflix, and something as alienating as KINDS OF KINDNESS gets theatrical? Maybe the industry is trying to prove a point that everyone is streaming and not as many are going to theaters, and while that may be true, it’s disheartening. I’m all for different types of movies—and art films—existing, but for movie lovers and those who still value the theatrical experience, I wish the industry would be willing to examine its practices to the same extent that Lanthimos is willing to dive into the experience of being human, with all its complexity when our motives are impure.
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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/