Kinds of Kindness is an anthology drama that follows three distinct storylines with a few strings connecting them. The first is the story of an employee trying to find a semblance of power in his relationship with his boss. The next is the story of a girlfriend coming home after being lost at sea but she is not the woman she was when she left. The final story is about a woman in a sex cult trying to find a miracle worker who can raise the dead. With a cast consisting of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley in each story, Yorgos Lanthimos consistently injects each fascinating story with a weirdness you will not find elsewhere.
Lanthimos blends each story with themes of love, purpose, and control. Every person in each story faces a conflict where they crave love or they crave power from someone they aren’t getting it from. In the first story, Jesse Plemmons life is being controlled by his boss (and lover) Willem Dafoe. When he can’t bring himself to one of Dafoe’s requests, he is cut off and his life begins to fall apart when he realizes how everything he has: his house, his wife, his lifestyle, was all given to him by DaFoe. That being said, even Lanthimos has said “We don’t work in an analytical way, so we don’t know what the theme is,” in an interview with Indiewire.
The movie can get very confusing with its story at times, especially in its second act. The second story was my least favorite because it was the easiest for me to get lost in. I don’t want to go into details as to why but with the first and third stories, they are very open and shut, with any unanswered questions not too important to my enjoyment of the story. However, here I couldn’t keep up with the twists and I was happy to move on to the next story.
The performances are excellent here as always. Yorgos Lanthimos has a history working with Stone, Qualley, and Dafoe as recently as last year in Poor Things and I believe those relationships helped get the best out of these actors. Especially since they had to play 3 or more distinct roles, every single actor deserves immense amounts of credit for all the hats they had to wear for this movie.
Yorgos is not shy about his unique tastes in movies. I have not gone fully down his filmography but after seeing Poor Things last year and seeing people say Kinds of Kindness would be more of a return to form for him. There is a lot of nudity, some of which feels like it just comes out of nowhere. I truly don’t mind it but fair warning, it happens frequently (not as much as in Poor Things) and without much warning. But I like that he knows his style and he commits to it. He gets his cast to buy in as well and that’s why I think that these films always have an audience, even if it pushes past their boundaries.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Kinds of Kindness is not going to be for everyone. This triptych is entertaining though as it weaves many themes of power and desire through each story. It gets weird in ways Yorgos Lanthimos can only get; if that’s something you can get down with, Kinds of Kindness is worth watching.
