Emma Stone’s new movie, Kinds of Kindness, shares one notable thing in common with the $115 million hit that won her a Best Actress Oscar. The trailer for Kinds of Kindness, the most recent big-screen collaboration between Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos, was recently released online, with the 46-second clip giving a general idea of the movie’s style and tone. The teaser also revealed that Kinds of Kindness continues to follow the same recent trend as Stone and Lanthimos’ last film, Poor Things.

Poor Things was the 2023 black-comedy fantasy that earned a total of 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Lanthimos. Between Poor Things and the duo’s first collaboration, 2018’s The Favourite, expectations for Stone and Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness couldn’t be higher. While the two films, overall, appear to be wildly different in terms of narrative and style, they do share one big thing in common: Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness both make use of a specific filming technique.

Kinds Of Kindness Is The Latest Movie To Make Use Of Black & White Scenes (Including Poor Things)

Black & White Is Having A Renaissance

Kinds of Kindness is just the latest in a list of movies to include black-and-white scenes. Lanthimos’s own Poor Things began as a black-and-white film before it switched to color when the protagonist, Bella Baxter (Stone), reached a key point in her emotional journey. On the other hand, two fellow 2024 Best Picture Oscar nominees, Oppenheimer and Maestro, both alternated between black-and-white and color throughout, with Oppenheimer‘s black-and-white scenes intended to represent a different viewpoint from the color ones. Meanwhile, Dune: Part Two’s black-and-white world was explained by in-universe rules.

Though the aforementioned titles all justify their black-and-white scenes differently, together, they may all point to a big shift in modern cinema. The more audiences acclimate to monochrome scenes in otherwise color movies, the more likely they are to embrace entirely black-and-white films. This means that fully black-and-white features could soon be the norm, and directors like Lanthimos, through his work with Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, would be seen as important players in bringing about that change.

How Kinds Of Kindness’ Black & White Scenes Could Be Different From Poor Things’

Both Films Offer Something Unique

Though many details surrounding Kinds of Kindness are still yet to be revealed, the movie does appear to be quite a stark departure from Poor Things. For starters, the upcoming film will be an anthology, presenting three separate stories that each have their own protagonist. This contrasts heavily with Poor Things, which followed a single character’s journey. While black-and-white was used in Poor Things to portray Bella’s life before she stepped out into the world and gained both freedom and independence, Kinds of Kindness could make use of black-and-white to isolate one character’s story from the others.

Interestingly, the trailer for Kinds of Kindness only features four black-and-white shots. One of which shows Willem Dafoe, who starred alongside Stone in Poor Things, laughing while in character. Dafoe can also be seen earlier in the trailer in a shot presented in color. It’s possible, therefore, that black-and-white will be used in the film to portray flashbacks in Dafoe’s character’s life. The fact that he appears happy in the black-and-white shot but miserable in the color one seems to corroborate this. Only time will tell what Stone and Lanthimos have planned in Kinds of Kindness.