‘Kinds Of Kindness’ Review – A Repetitive Fast-Paced Head-Scratcher [Cannes 2024]

During the last few years, director Yorgos Lanthimos has stepped back from his usual style of mixing conventional realities with surreal occurrences, bizarre characters and disturbing aspects. Those elements characterize his early features, such as The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but less so his recent work. The decision to leave that style a bit behind was probably made to reach a wider audience, which paid off as both The Favourite and Poor Things won multiple Academy Awards. However, in his latest feature, he returns to his roots. While not every choice works as intended, the A-list cast alone ensures that this head-scratcher is worth the admission price of a ticket.

Reunited with his lifelong writing partner, Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth, Alps), Lanthimos takes us to a place we’ve never been before. With Kinds of Kindness, he doesn’t give us one feature but three short movies combined into one trippy surrealistic film. With a cast consisting of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, that’s a great thing, as they all return for each segment but as different characters. The hair and make-up teams pull a lot of weight to ensure that every segment and character is being brought to the screen just as Lanthimos imagined them. The costume team choses this time for much more everyday-looking clothes instead of going over the top like in The Favourite. This naturalistic approach allows the cast members to become the stars of the three films, as they’re not over-classed by the bombastic hairpieces, dresses and costumes.

Alongside sharing the same cast members, the stories also share some important topics. While the three storylines are entirely different—the first is about a businessman surrendering free will, the second revolves around a missing wife turning up as a completely different person, and the last one features potential reanimation powers—many key ideas recur throughout the whole film.

The central theme is, without a doubt, abuse in many different forms. Whether it’s committing suicide with the risk of hurting other people, abusing others by brainwashing them, forcing abortions and telling your partner that she can’t get pregnant, or just wanting to kill others to use them for your own game, every segment shows us the darker side of humanity. We wouldn’t blame you if you thought that Kinds of Kindness would be a joyful comedy, but it’s everything but that. Some dark humour is present, but in essence, the feature is a disturbing tragedy. That haunting aspect is tangible due to cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s (The Favourite, American Honey) elegant framing.

You can feel Lanthimos and Ryan’s love for wide angles, and this time, they mainly combine it with fixed shots, low angles, tracking scenes and sweeping canvasses. The distorted space that are created by the wide lenses and the well–balanced and thrilling score create tension that will keep the audience on the edge of their seat. There’s a lot of repetition – especially during the first and final act – and while that sometimes takes out the pace and intrigue of the film, Kinds of Kindness grabs and keeps your attention for most of its prolonged 164 minutes runtime.

A second major topic re-occurring is obedience. Whether it’s obedience towards someone else or your work, each of the three unconnected episodes involves living your life in a way someone else wants it. In the first segment, you, for example, see how Plemons’s character, Robert, throws himself too much in his works. He wants to please his boss, Raymond (Dafoe), resulting in a distorted relationship with his partner, Sarah (Chau). The lies he told her as the slave of his boss come out one by one once he opens Pandora’s box, with disastrous consequences to follow.

The obedience aspect shines the brightest in the last short film in which many people, including Emily (Stone), are part of Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) in their cult. No one’s place in the cult is guaranteed and to ensure that she can stay, Emily needs to find the woman she sees in her dream to please the leaders.

Kinds of Kindness also deals with the human predisposition to obsessiveness, which goes hand-in-hand with the obedience element. Some of the characters are obsessed with being liked by others, resulting in a high level of dependency on said person and an unhealthy relationship with the same people. Robert’s life is completely mapped out, to the minute, by his boss. This result in Robert experiencing the feeling of imprisonment as he’s incapable of making his own decisions and taking life into his own hands.

You, as an audience member, will certainly also be obsessed. Maybe not by the maniacal boss, the secretive woman who returned from the death or the body in the morgue, but by the terrific cast. You must be in awe of them pulling triple (and, in Margaret Qualley’s case, quadruple) duties. All the cast members step out of their comfort zone and into the beautiful craziness Lanthimos created. They all portray each character in a spectacular, committed, gritty and uncanny way, but Stone (Cruella, Poor Things) and Plemons (Killers of the Flower Moon, Civil War) stand out in this feature.

The actors both have more screen time than the others, and they know how to use it. Stone gives a meticulously crafted performance, making her inexperienced cultist, Emily, the most memorable character. While Plemons shines throughout the entire feature, he shows us that he deservedly won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in the dark, unnerving first segment as the tormented businessman.

While Kinds of Kindness feels much more repetitive and uncomplete (maybe because there’s not a big climax at the end) than Lanthimos’ other features, the highly sharp, sleek, and vibrant cinematography and the magnetic cast ensure that it’s again a fast-paced, head-twisting rollercoaster ride you have to buckle yourself up for.

Kinds of Kindness held its World Premiere as a part of the In Competition section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The film will be released in the US on the 21st of June courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenwriters: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou

Rated: R

Runtime: 165m