A film by Yorgos Lanthimos
With: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer, Merah Benoit, Krystal Alayne Chambers
A triptych fable following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
Our rate: **
Lanthimos‘ earlier, more abstruse films, which more often concealed their intentions, intrigued us, prompting us to ask profound questions, and the mirror he held up to us used verbal and physical provocation and astonishing, often monstrous, images with a certain virtuosity. Over the last few years, Lanthimos has focused more on fables and tales, most often horrific, allowing him to give free rein to his fantasies (he’s still someone who creates worlds), his humor on the borderline between the absurd, the ridiculous and the trashy. Kinds of Kindness attempts – but doesn’t really succeed in – the challenge of length, of a story that renews and completes itself in three parts, as short story collections often do. But the disruptive quirkiness of the narrative isn’t enough to hold our attention for 3 hours. Kinds of Kindness doesn’t bother us, and we don’t question its primarily entertaining nature and function, which make it a rather good film, benefiting from polished direction, beautiful imagery and some good narrative ideas, but in our view, it doesn’t provide the aesthetic and philosophical shock we’d have liked to see at a Palme d’Or, the result being much closer to the universe of a Tim Burton than to that of, say, an Edgar Allan Poe, or, since he was cited as a possible model at the press conference, of a Luis Bunuel.