It’s not that there aren’t plenty of films being released all the time that are adventurous, challenging, or just plain odd. But they’re small, niche, aimed at arthouse audiences. Beyond the outrageous, brutal daring of Kinds of Kindness itself is the rather shocking fact that it is being pitched to multiplex audiences as a summer event film. That surprise announcement earlier this year of the film was clearly intended to ride the coattails of the (much-deserved) success of Poor Things, the previous collaboration between writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos and stars Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone, and particularly Stone’s Oscar win for Best Actress. And here’s Kindness getting a wide release? (At least in the US, where it got a limited release this past weekend and gets a wide one next. UK screen numbers aren’t yet available for next weekend’s opening.) Just in time for a major US holiday weekend traditionally big for moviegoing? Whoa.
Honestly, I didn’t think an industry leaning so hard on comic-book and kiddie-animation fantasies had this kind of risk-taking in them nowadays.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how this gambit plays out. Are mainstream audiences ready again for a movie that isn’t only unambiguously adult — in all senses of the word; hello, polyamorous partner-swapping sex scene! — but also this bleak? Because Poor Things, as bonkers and explicit and weird as that Frankengirl feminist fancy is, is practically a Disney fairy tale next to this mad monstrosity of a movie. Poor Things is in many ways a kind film. The title of this one deploys the word “kind” in ways that are nothing but supremely ironic and stretch the meaning of the word almost out of all recognition. (To be clear: this is a good thing.) It’s part of Lanthimos’s typical grotesque humor, on display here like never before. Which, given his filmography, is saying something.
Three separate short stories come together in ways that are loosely connected thematically — matters of control and coercion, twisted devotion, and desperation for love and connection weave through them — and tonally: all three tales are surreal, nihilist, and deeply misanthropic. Yay for a movie that actually attempts to capture how insane the world is today? How wretchedly so many of us are scrambling for meaning and identity and belonging no matter in what hellhole we can find it?
All three stories are, paradoxically, both not really about plot yet also tightly reliant on unsettling you with what happens next; even the most veteran movie lover, the most experienced devourer of any kind of storytelling, will be hard-pressed to guess what bizarre link will be added next to these separate chains of events. Which isn’t to suggest that these are stories that rely on cheap — or even elegant — “twists,” either, though. The peculiar genius of Lanthimos in this case (he cowrote the script with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou) is that the course of each story is perfectly reasonable and logical taken on its own terms… it’s just that those terms are so wildly, wonderfully absurdist, so eerily enigmatic, so profoundly perverse that they tickle with their delicious unpredictability.
It is so rare for a movie to surprise someone like me, who sees a ridiculous number of films each year. Yet sitting in the dark with Kindness unspooling before me was just nonstop novelty in the best way. What a thrill to be genuinely in awe of a film, and able to get genuinely lost in it! We can call this an original film, but that almost demands a redefinition of the word to encompass the downright feral inventiveness at work here.
The three stories are presented anthology-style, one short film after another, not as three entwined tales. Which means — more deliciousness — that we get to savor a brilliant cast in different roles in each story, all their characters so distinct from the other ones they portray that it becomes an embarrassment of creative riches. These artistic badasses, clearly having a ball, are: Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes, La La Land), Jesse Plemons (Civil War, Killers of the Flower Moon), Willem Dafoe (The Card Counter, Justice League), Hong Chau (Artemis Fowl, Downsizing), Margaret Qualley (Seberg, The Nice Guys), Joe Alwyn (Harriet, Mary Queen of Scots), and Mamoudou Athie (The Front Runner, Unicorn Store). The stories they slot into are about, loosely and to varying degrees metaphorically, the oppression of corporate employment, the mysteries of marriage, and the grip of cultish belief. (Elements are occasionally vaguely supernatural or glancingly science-fictional, which is genre-agnostic joy.) So, again: lots of 2020s angst and anxiety to play with. Authentic adult fun.
Tangentially intriguing is how Kinds of Kindness also plays with one of the things that has kept huge swathes of moviegoers hungry for sophisticated substance out of cinemas: the pleasure of bingeing quality visual storytelling at home. Because in some ways, with its serial stories, Kindness feels very much like that. Will all the recent industry handwringing about how to get butts back in multiplex seats be solved by a movie that feels, in some limited ways, like prestige TV?
more films like this:
• The Lobster [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Kanopy US | Max US | BFI Player UK]
• Babel [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Kanopy US]
