Film Review – Kinds Of Kindness (2024)

It only feels like yesterday that the world was taken over by the newest Yorgos Lanthimos film, rising to critical acclaim from its film festival run to its eventual – and perhaps inevitable – success during the Award season. And yet, here we are doing it all over again. This time, I am not talking about Poor Things but instead about Lanthimos’ latest directorial endeavour: Kinds of Kindness. Lanthimos also co-wrote the screenplay with Efthimis Fillippou who he had previously collaborated in previous films like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

KOK  is an absurdist black comedy film split into three distinct fables united in the bigger overall anthology of the film. “The Death of R.M.F.” is the first story, following Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons) whose life is dictated in every move by his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). “R.M.F. is Flying” shows us the life of a police officer Daniel (Jesse Plemons) whose wife Liz (Emma Stone), a marine biologist, was missing at sea but has recently been rescued and miraculously returns home, but with an odd behaviour that alarms her husband. Ultimately, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” starts with two cult members Emily (Emma Stone) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) as they look for a woman who can bring back the dead, despite a few unsuccessful attempts.

The acting is perhaps the most fascinating and interesting element of the film. Jesse Plemons and Margaret Qualley who both exhibit a phenomenal range particularly stand out as they transform in all the different characters they embody in the three short films. Similarly, the entire main cast is very impressive as they all manage to inhabit very different characters. And even in the absurdity of some of the plot points and sequences that we see throughout the movie, the stellar acting performances make it all seem perfectly believable. As a film that is equally ironic and surreal at times, it is a movie that is best watched with the biggest audience possible that will react to every moment in the narrative.

The format of the short film anthology, while fascinating and somewhat refreshing at first, is not entirely successful. Each short film left me wanting to know more about the complex characters and stories it sets out to explore, but never really does so enough to satisfy the audience’s curiosity. At the same time, I struggled to see how all the narratives were connected: there is no frame or overarching narrative that oversees these stories or why they are presented to us in this format. Ultimately, this contributes to the film overall feeling messy and rushed instead of the more polished and better-constructed product that it might have been with a little more work on why these stories should be shown one after the other.

Ultimately, because the stories feel unconnected from each other, the pacing is also a little off. The first story is fascinating and exciting to watch but as the audience quickly figures out the repetitive pattern that eventually shines through, the film ends up feeling slow halfway through, and yet narrative-wise the last story remains the most fascinating one to watch. As the movie goes on, Emma Stone has more than one monologue that at times seems to want to recreate the visionary success of Poor Things, in a very different setting that this time ends up feeling derivative and like something we have already seen before, in a Yorgos Lanthimos film in fact.

Although it may have not been my kind of film, Kinds of Kindness is nothing but a bad film. Its brilliant performances and interesting plotlines – if not only a little absurd at times – elevate the movie and make it a true Lanthimos classic that fans of the director will recognise and love. It may also not be Lanthimos best, at least for those of us in the audience who are still reminiscing about Poor Things of which this film seems to be riding the wave of attention to some level.

★★★1/2

In cinemas 28 June 2024/ Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Hunter Schaffer/ Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos/ Searchlight Pictures/ 15