Yorgos Lanthimos hopes to continue his red-hot streak with Kinds of Kindness, an anthology-esque feature starring some of his favourite players and a handful of new faces. Following so soon on from the runaway success of Poor Things, which scored four Academy Award wins including a trophy for lead actress Emma Stone, as well as nominations in Best Picture and Best Director for Lanthimos, the visionary has created a name for himself as one of the most reliable names working in Hollywood - so why does Kinds of Kindness feel like such a disappointing misfire?
Structured as a “tryptic fable”, consisting of three distinct but loosely connected stories, including that of a man trying to take control of his own life; a woman who returns after being lost at sea seemingly a different person; and the search for a woman destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader. Lanthimos directs and co-writes alongside Efthimis Fillppou, with performances from Emma Stones, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and more.
By their very nature, and in any format, anthologies are a difficult beast. At their core, they are collections of shorter works that are mostly unrelated but punchier in their length and impact - speculatively, however, on my part, they are often a fraction of their creative's best work. Sadly, that applies for Kinds of Kindness, a film whose deficiencies are unfortunately only exaggerated by the greatness it proceeds. Uneven, overlong and self-indulgent, there have been the faintest traces of this in Lanthimos' previous work, but is always overcome by a morbid fascination that accompanies it, making it impossible to turn away or resist; here, each segment of the triadic tale is both underdeveloped and unfulfilling, not developed enough in its own right to stand on its own, but not interesting enough to pursue as a richer, fully-formed idea anyway.
Reuniting with the screenwriter of his earlier ventures, Kinds of Kindness’ screenplay assembles three loosely linked stories without strong enough connectivity tissue to hold them together. Purposely cold-hearted and as misanthropic as ever, Kinds of Kindness is decidedly more absurd, but without the human element that elevated Lanthimos' more recent work with Tony McNamara, it's a more difficult pill to swallow, becoming somewhat of a chore to endure. Despite rehashing a similar tone each and every time, these works are not accompanied by anything thematically exciting enough to make them meaningful, instead feeling like three meandering stories that become more deeply frustrating as the minutes tick by. It dabbles with studying ownership and control but given that their similarities are vague and never enriching of each other, it feels like an accident rather than a purposeful decision.
Lanthimos' direction is solid if not as superlative as we have come to expect, without some of his signature quirks that make his work so distinctively compelling. Despite achieving some career-best work on Poor Things, Robbie Ryan's cinematography rarely excels because the world Kinds of Kindness unfolds in lacks the visual excitement that has benefited, and is so crucial to, Lanthimos' best storytelling; again, it gives the impression that this project is an afterthought, simply a slapdash amalgamation of leftover ideas thrown together. As a storyteller and filmmaker whose work has thrived on detail, ambition and resolution, Kinds of Kindness' shortcomings are all the more apparent.
Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness' MVP, offering a series of well-sketched characters that manage to overcome the confines of the scattershot script. Both his impressive dramatic and comedic abilities suit the unpredictable nature of a Lanthimos flick well, and while it may be disappointing that this is his first venture into the filmmakers' universe, you leave feeling somewhat encouraged that it reportedly won't be his last. Emma Stone similarly gives three solid performances, and her work in the second story makes it the most engaging of the three, but this lands bottom of the collaborators' four projects to date; somehow ironically given that an anthology by its nature *should* realistically offer its performers the greatest scope to experiment and shine, Stone - and many of the supporting performers, including Joe Alwyn and Hong Chau - are not given the opportunity to go above and beyond due to know limited it is narratively and thematically.
Kinds of Kindness is perhaps best summarised by one of its very closing reels: upon a perceived victory, Emma Stone dances to COBRAH's BRAND NEW BITCH, only to be shortly followed by a disaster that throws her hard work and sacrifices into ruin. Unintentionally a metaphor for the last twelve months Lanthimos has had, what should have been a moment of celebration backfires quite drastically. Undoubtedly a lesser effort from Lanthimos, this is arguably his weakest to date and despite the odd glimmers of his strength as a filmmaker peppered throughout, it is overall an uneven, overindulgent and half-hearted effort that feels like an afterthought. Morbid and emotionally unfulfilling, it's hard to be kind to the disappointing Kinds of Kindness.