Title – Kinds of Kindness (2024) 

Director – Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) 

Cast – Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau

Plot – Three separate stories following an eclectic array of people’s varied journeys in their quest to find contentment and happiness.    

“Everybody’s looking for something”

Review by Eddie on 03/09/2024

Riding on the highs of a hot streak that started with 2015’s cult favourite The Lobster and culminating in the commercial and critical hit that was last years wild Poor Things, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has become one of the premier properties in Hollywood and around the globe with his unique features often blending original ideas with devilishly inventive creativity with equally as much art and dark humour. 

Filmed seemingly as though it was a secret shoot soon after production of Poor Things wrapped, Lanthimos and his muse Emma Stone got to work on their New Orleans shot Kinds of Kindness, a multi-story epic that clocks in very close to three hours in length as the self proclaimed “triptych fable” explores the lives of some typically odd Lanthimos characters who are all trying to find their happiness in the crazy world we call home, that here just so happens to include very different types of canines, strange bosses and some suspect cults. 

Achieving great results mixing his deadpan vibes with a fantastic array of actors and production values that have gifted us with some of the most memorable original affairs of the last decade, Kindness marks the first real failure to launch for Lanthimos since his 2011 Dogtooth follow-up Alps, as the director and his game cast that’s lead by the always good Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Stone get lost in a film that believes it’s saying a lot without ever doing so, while its far too long runtime begins to grate well and truly by the half way mark.   

Starting out promisingly enough with the first section of its opening story, Kindness appears early on to be another wild and intriguing journey into the minds of a very creative filmmaker but there’s a distinct lack of wins for Lanthimos’s newest ride as the clock ever so slowly ticks over and Kindness is notable for marking down the first occasion I can recall where there’s barely an awkward chuckle or interesting proposal coming our way as we are instead greeted with dwindling results from a film that can only be described as self-indulgent and far too over confident. 

It’s a frustrating viewing experience, as there’s glimmers of the gold and magic that Lanthimos has often showed with his most notable works while it’s always a nice opportunity for us to witness the undoubtable skillsets of a cast like this in action but no amount of good will or brief segments of the film that might have been can save us from the fact this often uninteresting and unamusing affair is just frankly not that enjoyable or smart. 

With the main cast doing their best with what they’re given and a chance to once more witness Stone dancing up a storm in a Lanthimos collaboration, Kindness may not be a complete and utter write-off but it marks a recent low-point for a filmmaker who has quickly established a certain reputation and expectation to uphold that just isn’t met in this particular instance. 

Here’s hoping Lanthimos and Stone’s next collaboration Bugonia gets things back on track next year. 

Final Say – 

Far too long and with little of note to say and even less humour to say it alongside, Kind of Kindness has all the ingredients of what we love about a Yorgos Lanthimos’s feature but this cold dish culminates in a final result here that’s far from satisfactory. 

2 fingers out of 5