Lanthimos’ weakest work since ‘Alps’ is an uneven if morbid triptych of stories that operate as playful, nihilistic exercises at best, led by Cannes Best Actor winner Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. 

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Kinds of Kindness is, to me, Yorgos Lanthimos’ weakest work since Alps (2011), though the unprecedented attention garnered from his previous picture, the superior Oscar-winning Poor Things (2023), should translate into enough marketing buzz for this latest outing—an uneven triptych of stories—with a familiar roster of names including Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. 

The star of the show, however, is Jesse Plemons, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes, for playing three different roles. 

Stone, Dafoe, and the other cast members such as Margaret Qualley (fantastic in The Substance, which also played at Cannes) and Hong Chau (Oscar-nominated for 2022’s The Whale) also give a trio of performances each. 

Lanthimos spiritually returns to his ‘Greek Weird Wave’ phase of storytelling but now with a much bigger budget than before. 

Each unrelated hour-long segment does feel a tad too stretched out to justify its deceptively layered plotting.  These stories aren’t exactly complex in the first place, but they take time to be milked slowly and predictably go into bizarre directions. 

“She’s clearly insane.”

The first segment is perhaps the most cogent and satisfying as Plemons plays an employee who leads a life controlled by his boss who wants him to kill a man. 

The subsequent segments have their respective morbid ‘attractions’ that may be repulsive to some audiences, but Lanthimos is one of the few star directors working today (in the bigger playbox that is Hollywood) who can get away with an array of subject matter or scenes that would otherwise invoke the trigger warnings of today.

You name it: sexual assault, suicide, cannibalism religious sex cults and more are just another day’s work for Lanthimos and his Dogtooth (2009) co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou. 

While the filmmaking is precise and performances highly calibrated, Kinds of Kindness does frequently overreach thematically and is a playful, nihilistic exercise at best—it’s hard to ascertain or distil what each segment ultimately wants to say about our cruel world. 

At least, the characters meet the fates that they so thoroughly deserve. 

Grade: B-

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