Kinds of Kindness

Written and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by Efthimis Filippou

Yorgos Lanthimos teams up again with Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe with this anthology film. It is made up of three separate stories each starring Stone and Jesse Plemmons and to varying degrees Defoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie. The stories are unrelated, although each look at the human condition, the need to please, be wanted, be loved. The first focusses on Plemmons’s Robert, who will go to any lengths to please his boss Raymond (Defoe). The second finds Plemmons playing a cop, Daniel, whose wife is missing, however, when she returns, all is not what it seems and finally Stone and Plemmons are Emily and Andrew, members of a cult, tasked with finding their version of “The One” a woman with the ability to bring life back to the dead. Each told in a surreal, absurdly dark version of reality.

There is no doubt Lanthimos’s approach to film making is not to everyone’s tastes. He is experimental, uses cinema as an art to tell his stories and has a liking for the bizarre. But he treads a fine line between  imaginative story telling and style over substance. And Kinds of Kindness struggles to balance the two.

The film is definitely not going to work for some and didn’t all work for me. On the positives note, the stories all intrigued. The first and third the easiest to follow, they are stories of an eagerness to please and go beyond ones own levels of acceptable behaviour. The second story is more absurd and had a less clear message, if one at all!

But, it is much too long at around 2hr 45m. This is a big ask for this level of weirdness.  And then there is a question about how much substance it really has and whether it is just style and self indulgence over substance and some will certainly see it that way.

Kinds of Kindness will not be for everyone. I enjoyed it for the most part and the cast are hugely watchable. However, it is overly long and at times is style over substance. If you don’t like weird, give it a miss. Even if you do, strap in and proceed with caution!