Kinds of Kindness

Original title: Kinds of Kindness

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

Length: 164 min.

Year: 2024

Country: USA

Premiere: Cannes 2024

Synopsis: three separate surreal stories of acts of kindness and twisted social norms.

3.5/5

 

REVIEW

With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos masters the anthological form and elevates it high above its perceived "lesser" status, and simultaneously proves himself to be one of today's most consistent auteurs.

The title is very self explanatory: the three segments each focus on unordinary acts of kindness. Plot-wise, the three stories are entirely autonomous, yet linked by a common character, R.M.F., who has brief cameos in a similar fashion to the nameless man that appaers in all of the episodes of Kieslowski's Decalogue. It is not the only aspect in which Lanthimos seems to channel Kieslowski - the apparent ethical nature of the focus as explicited in the title, the cohesion of the segments might remind of the polish filmmaker - yet Kinds of Kindness is nothing like Kieslowski.

The same themes, same verbal or visual motifs pervade each segments: hospitals, meat eating, estranged sexual pleasure, the pervasive presence of dreams, emotional blackmail, the institution of marriage and missing parenthood all are aspects that organically connect the three films into, in fact, a single feature film. To the core, all three narratives have similar structures, but radically different evolutions and premises - at the core, however, each of the films feature a person in a hierarchical position, requesting an act of self sacrifice of sorts to another character.

Apparently, after the flamboyance of Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness might seem a step back towards the surreal tones of Lanthimos' previous films. In fact, his short film Nimic shares the closest resemblance, be it the similar insistence on the deconstruction of marriage. Kindness does inherit from Poor Things similar aesthetics when it comes to colour grading or editing, an evolution in style compared to the previous films of Lanthimos.

Hardly connected to the greek tragedy at this point, if not in its euripidesque insitence of inevitability and unescapability, as well as the presence of gore and violence, Kinds of Kindness builds its own separate mythology - a mythology of potentiality, in which the same actors take on different roles - though always in similar positions of power.
Kinds of Kindness got booed at one of the press screenings, yet is definitely a solid entry in the works of Yorgos Lanthimos. Perhaps the audience of Cannes, after The Killing of the Sacred Deer, is simply  incapable of appreciating the works of one of the most distinct voices of contemporary cinema.