Poor Things was anything but a typical year-end award winner, but it was of a general piece with director Yorgos Lanthimos’ recent star-studded films, from 2015’s The Lobster and 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer to 2018’s Oscar-winning The Favourite. All of these off-kilter works marked their maker as one of modern cinema’s most floridly idiosyncratic, although in terms of sheer eccentricity they still paled in comparison to the features that earned him initial international recognition, beginning with 2009’s Dogtooth. Those breakthrough efforts were resolutely strange and opaque, challenging audiences to not only follow their winding courses and haphazard detours but to tolerate their peculiar rhythms, uncanny humor, and unexpected grossness.
And with Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos now brings his old-school degree of bizarreness to the mainstream.
A triptych whose title provides merely a vague clue as to its overriding purpose, Lanthimos’ latest, which hits theaters June 21, is a study of compassion, love, sacrifice, and belonging that doesn’t embrace oddness so much as sloppily tongue-kiss it. Attuning itself to its own wacko wavelength and then riding it through three distinct tales—which are populated by the same actors in different roles—it’s about as unconventional as marquee releases get, frustrating easy readings and thwarting dramatic and comedic expectations at every careening turn. Alternately electric and maddening, it’s likely to polarize audiences more than any multiplex offering this year.
