Be kind to your mind, skip Kinds of Kindness

Emma Stone, please stop making movies with Yorgos Lanthimos. I simply can’t keep watching them.

I chose to go watch Kinds of Kindness in the theater because I saw a funny clip of Emma Stone dancing. Unfortunately, this long-anticipated moment was the last and only funny scene of Yorgos Lanthimos’ almost three-hour movie. The film suffers from delusions of artistic significance coupled with a heavy dose of meaninglessness. 

Kinds of Kindness is really three *cough cough* conceptual stories paired together. The first shows an abusive employee/employer relationship. The second is a violent marital relationship and the third shows a spiritually abusive cult. All three contain graphic and frankly, strange forms of violence.

While watching it, I felt tense, even anxious over what would happen next. The film had a way of both fulfilling the absolute worst outcomes I could imagine and subverting my expectations. The problem is there isn’t any payoff. Lanthimos relentlessly builds tension. He includes staccato bursts of tension grotesquery but they only seem to lead to more meaningless violence.

Spoiler alert: One of the more horrifying scenes includes a main character chopping off her own finger. This immediately reminded me of The Banshees of Inisherin – a film that arguably accomplished everything Kinds of Kindness intended to about a hundred times better. Banshees discusses loneliness, years of interpersonal drama, and a town’s worth of vivid personalities as the grounding device for its strange and often shocking plot. Kinds lacks all of this humane depth but keeps the shock value.

For example, Joe Alwyn’s character in the third part is pure evil without any mitigating humanity. The cult leaders played by Daniel Defoe and Hong Chau are esoteric and vague in their cruelties. Most of the film’s characters’ motivations are entirely obscured from the viewers making them uncompelling. The most humane moments in the film are with characters experiencing extreme desperation such as Emma Stone’s characters in the second and third parts or Jesse Plemons’ in the first. Without spoiling too much, the plots of each story though unpredictable are incredibly simple making the film feel stretched out in an attempt to build tension rather than full of plot and character development. The story might have held up better as 20-minute vignettes, not nearly 3 hours of cinematic gobbledygook. 

Although I can sympathize with Yorgos’ delight in oddities, his strangeness needs to be backed up by compelling storytelling. Horror and ennui are fine in their places but they don’t make sense on their own. To be completely honest, while watching I found myself waiting, not for the plot to ripen but for the film to end.

A general plea to filmmakers: if you’re going to make a 3-hour film, make something, anything matter during the movie.

---

“Kinds of Kindness” is now playing in theaters nationwide. Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language.

---