plot cast film review Emma Stone|Style

The contemporary era put to sword and fire by Yorgos Lanthimos is a universe of oppression, violence and various (in)human bestiality. To act as a common thread for the three episodes that make up the new film Kinds of Kindness (in cinemas) is the theme of “kindness” always denied. Theme embodied by the protagonist actors, who play different characters in the 3 stories: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hunter Schafer…

After the premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival (Best Actor Award to Jesse Plemons), the controversial Kinds of Kindness. That is, the new extreme extravaganzaexcessive, but rather vacuous, at times irritating, by Yorgos Lanthimos. With the “muse” Emma Stone, already a “poor creature”. A film for “Lanthimosians” only. Avoid sensitive glances.

Three episodes of strange, excessive and unpleasant everyday life. In New Orleans. In the first (RMF’s death), a humble clerk (Jesse Plemons) is literally slave of his master (Willem Dafoe) who gives him absurd orders and has even chosen his wife for him. When the master asks the dependent succubus to kill a person, he refuses, then thinks better of it.

In the second (RMF flies), the wife (Emma Stone) of a policeman (Plemons) disappears in a shipwreck. When his wife returns home, her husband becomes convinced that she is a lookalike and asks her for increasingly absurd “identity” proof.

In the third (RMF eats a sandwich), a young woman (Stone) is part of a strange sect that feeds only on tears. The girl look for the twin (Margaret Qualley) of a dead woman to bring the dead back to life… The meaning of REM runs with the credits…

The English title Kinds of Kindness it is repeated three times in the poster and in the trailer, as many episodes as there are in the film. Almost like one Magic formula, as if to multiply the meaninglessness. The title is a play on assonances to indicate “types of kindness”. The actors returning in different roles seem like a Brechtian estrangement which takes away all empathy.

If there is something missing in the stories at center stage and even more so in the author’s gaze, it is precisely the “kindness” of the title. As well as grace or a fragment of humanity. The thin common thread between the three chapters – in addition to the actors – is precisely there the absence of beauty, goodness, hope. After the “poor creatures” of the previous film (4 Oscars 2024), between abstraction, Escherian labyrinth and steam punk aesthetics, Lanthimos returns to a dark contemporaneity mixed with grotesque realism, caricatural sketch and bad taste joke.

He wrote the film together with his regular co-writer Efthimis Filippou (all, except The favourite And Poor creatures!). And it explicitly pays homage to Rainer W. Fassbinder, but also On the edge of reality by immersing it in acid. However, abstruseness becomes mannersexcessive bizarreness is a manifesto of csmug mockery. No “moral” stories. Like a little wave of lye poured over the obvious. At the end of the vision, after 165 minutes of sensory and thematic gloomthere is almost nothing left…

We advise you to recover the “cornerstones” of Lanthimos’ cinema: Dogtooth (2009, on Sky Cinema and NOW), Alps (2011, DVD import), The Lobster (2015, streaming on NOW), The sacrifice of the sacred deer (2017, Prime Video). The favourite (2018, on Disney+ and Netflix) e Poor creatures! (2023, Disney+).

Also worth seeing is the masterpiece with its apocalyptic veins Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson (1999, Sky Cinema and NOW), The monsters by Dino Risi (1963, DVD Cecchi Gori), The ringing in the nose by and with Ugo Tognazzi, from a story by Dino Buzzati (1967, DVD CG Entertainment), and Strange stories – Tales from the end of the century by Sandro Baldoni (1994, currently out of print).