Yorgos Lanthimos won the Golden Lion at the most recent Venice Film Festival thanks to Poor Things, which won Emma Stone the Oscar for best actress. Less than a year later, he teamed up again with the American actress and Willem Dafoe for Kinds of Kindness, presented in competition at Cannes last month, where it won Jesse Plemons the Prix d male interpretation.
A black comedy, Kinds of Kindness is a sketch film which is divided into three chapters, and as many cruel tales, always performed by the same troupe – Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Joe Alwyn are added to the cast.
In the first story, a man attempts to regain control of his own life, at the mercy of a guru who dictates his behavior from morning to night – from the whiskey he must drink after work to the novel (by Tolstoy) which he must read through the frequency of his sexual relations and his right to have children. The second chapter tells the story of a paranoid police officer whose wife has disappeared at sea, and the third, the fate of a mother who left her husband and child for a sect, who seeks to find a young woman destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
After the sordid Dogtooth (2010), the hilarious The Lobster (2015) and the disturbing The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimos is once again interested with his twisted mind in the notion of dispossession of free will. We find the usual cynical humor of the filmmaker of The Favourite, but in smaller doses.
For a rare time, a Lanthimos film does not seem to suffer from length (despite a running time of 2 hours 45 minutes), but Kinds of Kindness is less impactful than the Greek filmmaker’s most recent offerings. Sketch films are inevitably uneven. The first chapter of Kinds of Kindness is more successful than the next two. Admirers of Lanthimos should not shy away from their pleasure.
