Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film, the Oscar-winning Poor Things, was ultimately a nice movie for the director. Yes, it was bizarre and filled with sex scenes, but when you really boil it down to its essence it was the uplifting story of a woman gaining her sense of self and thus unusual in his oeuvre, which is full of bleak comedies where fathers lie to their children to keep them imprisoned at home and a happy ending means blinding yourself.
Now Lanthimos and his Poor Things star Emma Stone are back and at the Cannes Film Festival with Kinds of Kindness, a film of a much different outlook on humanity. This omnibus, consisting of three stories, is brimming with cruelty as it weaves tales of people who act out to appease the ones they love—or at least think they love. You see a limb chopped off, an organ removed, and Jesse Plemons licking a gunshot wound in Joe Alwyn’s hand, among other atrocities. The message of Kinds of Kindness is that to win the affection of their desires, humans will do the unspeakable and therefore are selfish and unredeemable. It’s great.
It also feels like pure uncut Yorgos, working in tandem with Efthimis Filippou, with whom he also wrote the likes of Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, both of which have a lot in common with Kinds of Kindness given their interest in social experiments and moral quandaries. Lanthimos and Stone’s collaboration once again produces bold acting, but the film also reveals that the director has found another muse in Plemons, who anchors two installments.
