Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Director Yorgos Lanthimos' previous two
collaborations with Emma Stone, 2018's The Favourite and 2023's Poor
Things, made it into the top five on my year-end best lists for their
respective years. So it brings me no joy to say that their latest
collaboration, Kinds of Kindness, is a punishing endurance test for
viewers with little to recommend about it.
What's different this time around for
Lanthimos and Stone? Screenwriter Tony McNamara wrote excellent scripts for The
Favourite and Poor Things (as well as Stone's highly entertaining Cruella),
but he is not the screenwriter on Kinds of Kindness. Lanthimos co-wrote
this script with Efthimis Filippou. Lanthimos would not be the first talented
director who does better when he works from someone else's script, but it seems
to be the case here.
Kinds of Kindness tells three
separate stories featuring roughly the same group of actors playing different
roles in each segment (Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and New
Orleans native Hong Chau among them). The first story is about a boss (Dafoe)
who micromanages an employee's (Plemons) life to the minute. The second is
about a cop (Plemons) whose wife (Stone) returns after going missing but is not
quite the same. The third is about a sex cult looking for a chosen woman with
powers to raise the dead. If there is a unifying theme, there seems to be a
thread of people desperately doing anything to make an abusive person(s)
love/accept them.
But with rare exception, the characters
don't exhibit anything resembling recognizable human behavior. Poor Things was
a provocative and very R-rated film but it had a classic quest story structure
and a sympathetic heroine on a journey of feminist self-discovery. Kinds of
Kindness' stories lead nowhere and just feature a relentless parade of
weirdness for the sake of weirdness and grotesquerie for the sake of
grotesquerie. The movie contains rape, animal abuse, licking of gunshot wounds,
and a character cutting off one of their own body parts before cooking and
serving it to another person. Oh, and the film runs for a grueling two hours
and 45 minutes.
In defense of the cast, they are brave
in their willingness to perform all of the ugliness on display in Kinds of
Kindness. But when a cast is this game to try anything, the director has to
honor their courage by making a good film and Lanthimos failed them here. The
best part of the film was a scene featuring Lawrence Johnson as a police chief.
Kinds of Kindness is the only credit on Johnson's IMDB page. I'm
assuming he's a local since the film was shot in the New Orleans area. He plays
a police chief, and he gets a big laugh as he flatly and accurately describes a
character's exceedingly strange behavior. He is the film's highlight, in large
part because he seems believable and real.
The other time I laughed was when a
group of three people, well into the film's running time, mistakenly entered
the Kinds of Kindness auditorium at the Broad Theater. They looked up at
what was happening on the screen, one exclaimed "What the ****?!", and they
scurried out.
Critics will sometimes label movies that are conventionally entertaining with sympathetic characters and happy endings as trite or hokey. In some cases, they have a point. But just because a movie is as intentionally ugly, weird, and off-putting as Kinds of Kindness is doesn't make it good, either.
