Kinds of Kindness: Movie Review

Cast: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Yorgos Stefanakos
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

A triptych of fables that are supposedly rooted in black humour but just feel mean-spirited in parts, Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos' latest sees him reteaming with Emma Stone.

However, this trio of tales doesn't carry a narrative thread through, and has the distinction of retaining one character throughout yet all the same actors. It's an important distinction for a film that lasts nearly three hours and can occasionally seem like a rambling shaggy dog story.

And yet, at its core, all three of Lanthimos' tales have to do with power in some form or other.

From its opening tale which sees Jesse Plemons' Robert who does everything his boss Raymond (Defoe) tells him, to its concluding tale about a cult trying to find a woman who can reanimate the dead, there's the very loosest of threads to help you traverse proceedings.

But the tales aren't strong enough to fight off feelings of ennui throughout.

No matter how well constructed they are, the tapestry feels like it has been pulled together too tightly, and as a result, elements feel strained.

Fortunately, Plemons' performance throughout each singular tale (though to a lesser extent in the final one) gives it the dramatic in-point that's needed. Whether it's just losing a moustache from story to story, the chameleonic actor manages to make every single second count and every character beat hit when it needs to.

There are some dour moments in among the oddness, but much of Kinds of Kindness feels like a joke at the audience's expense and one perhaps that they're not all entirely comfortable with.

Perhaps that's some of the issue with Kinds of Kindness - at times, it feels muted and the warped humour not quite warped or dark enough for narrative purposes. Perhaps if some of the absurdities had been revelled in more, it would have progressed proceedings, but Lanthimos seems obsessed with his vision, almost to the detriment of the final product.

It may require Kinds of Kindness from audiences to persevere, and perhaps the arthouse crowd may be willing to forego the weaker vision here, but the utterly vicious Lanthimos who eviscerated the screen in The Killing of a Sacred Deer is sadly nowhere to be found in enough quantity within this release.