Yorgos Lanthimos is taking advantage of the moment – and Emma Stone has joined him. The success of POOR THINGS (2023), which the US actress recently won an Oscar for, is still hanging in the air and the Greek director is already presenting his next film. Stone plays a central role here too, but not initially. First, Lanthimos makes way for Jesse Plemons, who has rarely performed more fearlessly and convincingly than here.

KINDS OF KINDNESS is an intricate triptych, three films in one, with the same actors, the same strange dynamic, the same claim to disturbance and absurdity. Three stories about power and egotism, delusion and despair. Only the names of the protagonists change and how the characters relate to each other.

In the first episode, Plemons embodies businessman Robert who has a happy marriage with his wife Sarah (Hong Chau). Robert owes everything he has to his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe), who controls every small detail of his employee (food, cocktails, sex). Robert dutifully submits to the intimate tyranny until his boss demands that he commit murder. In that moment, his entire existence falls like a house of cards and Rita (Stone), Raymond’s new willing underling, replaces him, The other two stories also shift from harmless to grotesque, macabre, shameless before you know it: a cop is unsettled because he suspects that his wife, a marine biologist, has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman who can allegedly revive the dead.

Part of the eerie fascination of Lanthimos' film is that not only do the actors repeat themselves in the individual narrative variations, but certain patterns and motifs also unmistakably emerge behind the everyday horror. Lanthimos sometimes uses drastic means to show how much circumstances determine life, or how people are prisoners of their own truths and delusions. This time around he may be less subtle and coherent, but he has the same unabashed joy in excess and immoral intrigue.

Pamela Jahn

Translation: Elinor Lewy