It's not that there aren't plenty of films being released all the time that are adventurous, challenging or just plain odd. But they're mostly small, niche and aimed at arthouse audiences. So it's rather shocking that the outrageous, brutal daring of Kinds of Kindness is being pitched to multiplex audiences as a summer event film. The surprise announcement of the film earlier this year was clearly intended to ride the coattails of the success of Poor Things, the Oscar-winning collaboration between writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos and stars Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe.
Kinds of Kindness getting a wide release just in time for a major holiday weekend traditionally big for moviegoing? Whoa. Honestly, I didn't think an industry leaning so hard on comic book and kiddie animation fantasies had this kind of risk-taking still in 'em.
It's going to be very interesting to see how this gambit plays out. Are mainstream audiences ready again for a movie that isn't only unambiguously adult — in all senses of the word (hello, polyamorous partner-swapping sex scene!) — but also this bleak?
As bonkers and explicit and weird as Poor Things' Frankengirl feminist fancy was, it is practically a Disney fairytale next to this mad monstrosity of a movie. Poor Things is in many ways a kind film. The title of this one deploys the word "kind" in ways that are nothing but supremely ironic and stretch the meaning of the word almost beyond all recognition. It's Lanthimos at his peak grotesque humor, which — given his filmography — is saying something.
The film is structured as three separate short stories presented anthology-style, one short film after another. While they don't intertwine, they come together here in ways that are loosely connected thematically: matters of control and coercion, twisted devotion, and desperation for love and connection. Tonally, all three tales are surreal, nihilist and profoundly misanthropic. Yay for a movie that actually attempts to capture how wretchedly so many of us are, scrambling for meaning and identity and belonging no matter which hellhole we must descend into to find it.
We get to savor the brilliant cast portraying different roles in each of the three stories, all their characters so distinct from the others that it becomes an embarrassment of creative riches. The artistic badasses (clearly having a ball) are Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie. The stories they slot into are loosely about the oppression of corporate employment, the mysteries of marriage and the grip of cultish belief. So, again: lots of 2020s angst and anxiety to play with while creating authentic adult fun.
All three stories are not really about plot, yet are paradoxically also tightly reliant on unsettling you with what happens next. Even the most veteran moviegoer will be hard-pressed to guess what bizarre link will be added to these chains of events next. Which isn't to suggest that these are stories that rely on "twists" either. The peculiar genius of Lanthimos in this case is that the course of each story is perfectly reasonable and logical taken on its own terms... it's just that those terms are so wildly, wonderfully absurdist, so eerily esoteric, so profoundly perverse that they tickle with their delicious unpredictability.
It is so rare for a movie to surprise someone like me, who sees a ridiculous number of films each year. Yet sitting in the dark with Kindness unspooling before me was just nonstop novelty in the best way. We can call this an original film, but that almost demands a redefinition of the word to encompass the downright feral inventiveness at work here.
Intriguingly, the serial storytelling of Kinds of Kindness also plays with a notion that has kept huge swathes of people away from cinemas of late: the pleasure of bingeing quality visual storytelling at home. Could all the recent industry hand-wringing about how to get butts back in multiplex seats be solved by a movie that, in some limited ways, feels like prestige TV?
Kinds of Kindness
