There are few, if any, international (non-UK) filmmakers with as much power in Hollywood as Yorgos Lanthimos right now. He’s attached himself to one of the biggest stars in the industry and cultivated a stable of elite character actors to support the other minor stars he has the pull to cast in his films. His trademark tonal style gives his oeuvre a clear throughline even when working with different writers. Coming off the critical and commercial success of the Emma Stone-led “Poor Things,” Lanthimos has a creative freedom most artists could only dream of. What has he done with all that freedom? He’s gone backwards.
Maybe that’s to be expected when reuniting with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, whose previous collaborations with Lanthimos have (mostly) been varying degrees of good. But Lanthimos, in “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” had seemed to find a way to blend his perverse, off-putting sense of humor with a more mainstream, crowd-pleasing warmth. That’s not to say one is better than the other — I love a cold, cynical movie as much as anyone — but it would’ve been interesting to see how far Lanthimos could have pushed a mainstream audience into his arthouse sensibilities.
Alas, Lanthimos retreats into his more juvenile tendencies, though this time a couple of twists provide at least some intrigue. The first is the structure. “Kinds of Kindness” is a three-film anthology in which the same small group of actors attack stories of cruel and unusual punishment enacted on people because of their hubris. Or… something like that. The thematic connection between the shorts, if one exists at all, is surface-level at best and incoherent at worst. The segments don’t add anything to one another, and the effect is a wheel-spinning bore that exponentially decreases in quality through its bloated runtime.
At least Lanthimos brings a bit more bombast than in his other Filippou-written films, but that only causes the delicate rhythmic and tonal balance that those films needed to be thrown off their axes. The humor doesn’t work, the emotional core is always undermined in favor of a terrible joke, and the actors all play their roles with different interpretations in mind. These issues are telegraphed early when Lanthimos opens his film with Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” — already a bizarre choice — and then moves directly from this big, pulsating song to a quieter, stilted, slow opening segment. It’s a bold choice that faceplants immediately — the film’s only clear running theme.
“Kinds of Kindness” is the worst kind of big swing. It’s not different enough from what came before to stand out among far superior works, and the changes made are detrimental to the existing foundation laid out in those same works. Lanthimos will get back on track — it’s been less than a year since he released one of his best films — but this “experiment,” if it can even be called that, is mostly a failure. It’s a step back in a career that has, to this point, only pushed forward.
