Movie Review: Kinds of Kindness

Following their critical and commercially successful collaboration that resulted in 2023’s Poor Things, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone have now embarked on the triptych fable entitled Kinds of Kindness. Though it has its share of shining moments and thought-provoking sequences, the new film is ultimately a letdown after the triumph of the pair’s previous endeavor.

The trio of tales found within Kinds of Kindness are centered around: 1) a man desperately trying to regain control of his life; 2) a police officer whose wife has mysteriously returned after being lost at sea and now appears to be a completely different person; and, 3) a woman searching for the messiah foretold by the religious group she is a part of.

Throughout these three tales, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe assume and inhabit multiple roles (as do many other actors within the film): some overlap, and some continue from story to story. To their credit, these three all deliver fine performances, but their work is not enough to rescue the film from the narrative weight it has created for itself as the triptych formula proves to be the film’s ultimate undoing.

The narrative focus throughout the three tales proves to be scattered and somewhat less focused than Lanthimos’s previous work. While there is a central through-line of sorts tying the three stories together, it plays more as an afterthought than as something organic intended to service the overall work as a whole. This results in a screenplay – which Lanthimos wrote along with Efthimis Filippou – that is more haphazard and lazily constructed than it should be.

Emma Stone and Joe Alwyn in “Kinds of Kindness.” Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/Atsushi Nishijima.

Utilizing frequent collaborators such as composer Jerskin Fendrix, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, and film editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, director Lanthimos again creates an intriguing palette with which his world is constructed, but the problem here is that there is no life within this particular story. It is simply a collection of tales about individuals going through the motions of the conflicts laid out in front of them.

While Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, undoubtedly both have better days ahead of them than what is presented in Kinds of Kindness, their current project represents a misguided attempt to pull something off that perhaps was best left undone.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com

An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

@miketyrkus

Mike Tyrkus

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