Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness

The Critically Acclaimed Director’s Latest ConBy Carlos Valladares

Kinds of KindnessDirected by Yorgos Lanthimos(2024)

Can we finally call Yorgos Lanthimos’s bluff? We get it. You’re weird, you’re a feminist, you’re from Greece, mess interests you. But Lanthimos’s mess has never been the real, pockmarked, funky mess we see in Luis Buñuel, Catherine Breillat, Amos Poe, or Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992). Their works embody the grist and terror of life. Not Yorgos. His is a gentrified mess, a lifeless mess. A con, in other words.

There are some directors whose films you watch and watch because you love the director. You love their worlds. I love the people-obsessed warmth of the Robert Altman lazy-zoom, I love the elaborate crane shots of a Vincente Minnelli or a Jacques Demy that make me float all dreamlike, I love the tinkered-over order threatening to dissolve any second inside a Yasujirō Ozu house, I love the unfurling of Chantal Akerman’s long-shots plagued with memory and squandered desires. Everything in their films is love. And then there’s Yorgos. I’ve now watched five of this man’s films. Each time, I, too sincerely curious, have wondered: “Maybe this is the one that explains why he’s beloved? Maybe now he will click.” Nope (Dogtooth). Not that one (The Lobster). Or that one (The Favourite). Definitely still don’t get it, and now I’m getting irritated (Poor Things). And now: Kinds of Kindness, the flimsiest and most self-indulgent of all his nasty concoctions. It’s nearly three hours. It’s anti-audience. It’s his most complicated structure. It feels like a personal project for Lanthimos: making a film like he used to in Greece, but with a big studio and an all-star cast to foot the bill. And yet, it’s still the same noxious and loveless world, the same irritating jokes around bodies fucking without charisma and women’s necks broken because the director likes it like that. Kindness features an ensemble cast à la Robert Altman, but enduring Lanthimos’s 164 minutes, all I could do was groan and write in my journal “I miss Robert Altman.” Altman was never so excruciatingly unimaginative.

Kindness is an anthology film, each story the length of an episode of a prestige TV series. That’s three shots for Lanthimos to land. Amazingly, each shot is missed. All the stories feature some variation of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons (who won the Best Actor award at Cannes for this; I love him, as we all do, but for this?), Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie. In the first, Plemons tries to win the love of a domineering daddy type (Dafoe); par for the course of a blank Lanthimos cipher, this means that Plemons is made to run over a random dude who has consented to be 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed as a favor to Daddy Dafoe, because it’s such a darling privilege to do what he tells you to. (Is this Lanthimos’s confession?)

The second story, an also-ran riff on Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965), follows a thinly-imagined cop (Plemons) who doesn’t know what love looks like, even when it (Emma Stone as Liz) literally stares him in the face. Liz goes missing on a marine biologist trip on an island, and, when she returns, Plemons’s character is convinced it’s not really Liz. What follows is the now-familiar Lanthimos feel-bad plot: how far will a sappy victim go for love in vain? He wants proof she loves him. Chop off your finger and cook it for me, woman. Ah, you did. Pull out your liver, then. Ah. In the end, he gets what he wants: a reunion with the “real Liz” of his mind. This is supposed to leave us bitter and aghast. But, as in the first story, I’m left hollow.

The third is an attempt to harmonize an arbitrary amalgam of ideas, and the harmony is plainly nonsensical: a resurrection plot; a 𝓈ℯ𝓍 cult obsessed with “purity”; twins out of Altman’s 3 Women (1977); the horrors of being chained in loveless marriages; the betrayals one should, apparently, always expect from a partner; and the cruelty we nasty brutes of humans dole out daily to animals, nice cute girls with good hearts—things of that ilk. Margaret Qualley figures heavily here as twins, one pick-me and desperate to be sacrificed for the vague cultish good, one nice as the dog-whispering dickens. Two Qualleys: that comes out to double the degradation. Judging by her sweaty, careening performance in Claire Denis’s otherwise interminable Stars at Noon (2022), Margaret Qualley is a vital force of intensity in the landscape of US acting. She can make any line of dialogue, any gesture, skip and dance. But here, under the direction of Lanthimos, all she does is ᵴtriƥ, dive twice into an empty swimming pool, break her head, bleed, and get resuscitated—only to finally die in a car-crash, stuck in the glass-shattered dashboard of a Mustang. Qualley is trapped in a poor man’s Beckettian purgatory. I reach my breaking point when marital rape is referred to as “contamination” that just needs a little sweat-out in the sauna to fix. It’s the same willful infantilization that made riding your lover an act of “furious jumping” in the mind of a 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦-brained Poor Things woman (another fake grab to be part of a contemporary feminist discourse).

Across the three stories, roles are traded back and forth. Lots of resets. Characters die, characters come back. Absurd? Cruel? Pointless? That’s life, says Kinds of Kindness. No, it’s not, says I. To dissolve into such banal truisms is the easy, false way out of the rhythm of life. Dissolve, and you’ve succeeded in cheapening the value of a soft person-to-person connection simply because the human condition involves, not to an insubstantial degree, living and eating and fucking and dying. Homer already said it. Such disillusion like Lanthimos’s is the desperate reaction of only the most malignantly privileged.

Is Lanthimos saying that nowadays we are only capable of fake emotions, fake houses? I’m not even knocking the rich: Lord knows I love and have learned to love, in part, from the elites in Whit Stillman’s, Leo McCarey’s, and Preston Sturges’s comedies, not to mention those around me. But their people believe in something, even if it’s something silly as an invention that will bring them and the neighborhood kids a fortune (Christmas in July), especially if it is love (Love Affair, The Last Days of Disco). In Lanthimos, we only have a synthetically weird spectacle (Emma Stone twerking), rich nihilists acting cruel to each other for hours. And we pay them for the honor.

If you like obvious style, you might be charmed by Lanthimos. You will feel proud for recognizing, once again, his corny musical stings reminiscent of John Addison’s annoying score to Tom Jones (and with Tony Richardson, Lanthimos is in good “hot air” company). This time, Jerskin Fendrix (who scored Poor Things) adds some hollow piano notes struck atonally like an imitation of Arthur Schoenbergian seriousness, plus some even more hollow piano motifs from what sounds like a GarageBand project (Ironic Sad, Weird #1, Weird #2). This is meant to signal that we’re in sinister, paranoid territory—because Lanthimos has no faith that a modern European-American audience will Get The Vibe. You might also jump for joy at seeing Yorgos hit his branded marks: the grotesque fish-eye lenses, the starchy tableaux, the irritating zooms on people centered aggressively in the middle, the cavernous bourgeois interiors as clean and un-lived-in as the COVID mansion where Sam Levinson dithered about shooting Malcolm and Marie (2021).

The great Hong Chau is made to zombie her way through situations in such breathtakingly hollow, checked-out ways. When she’s told she’s been drugged by husband Jesse Plemons in order to induce miscarriages (and that’s all a woman is in a Lanthimos flick: an inert, comatose body), Chau’s resultant freak-out is mannered, like a high-schooler performing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And it’s not just Chau: every good actor in this is forced to recite impossible dialogue in the most natural tone possible. Emma Stone delivers a speech here about dreaming that she’s a dog, that dogs rule the world, which is perhaps the worst monologue I’ve ever heard in a film. Its point is thunderingly clear as the film goes on: We are at the level of dogs; we expect unconditional love from certain people even if they don’t give it back to us. Only dogs are capable of that. But the chewy amount of words Stone is given to deliver this—set to the Ironic Sad piano motif, as the camera sneak-zooms into her face in a long-take to give added synthetic weight to her words—only signal “I’m Giving a Speech.” We are encouraged to accept the unreal, forgetting that the beauty of life is its unruly synthesis of the real and the unreal. Watching this speech, watching anything by Lanthimos, you only focus on the unreal (and such a bland unreal, I might add), taking this to be the sole reality. It is no surprise that Lanthimos’s ignorant avoidance of the real finds a ready audience with masses weaned on US aesthetics, the country par excellence of ignorant avoidance.

Lanthimos’s hermetic interiors set the backdrop for his profoundly un𝓈ℯ𝓍y, anti-mystery purgatory that cons us into thinking he’s made a convincing metaphor for modern life. Well before Kindness, he’s been doing this act since the days of Dogtooth. Lanthimos’s films, usually co-written by either Efthimis Filippou or Tony McNamara, reduce women to the level of plastic bodies manipulated by Pygmalion types.

The solutions to problems in Kinds of Kindness are boringly material: Run over the body with a car! Get pregnant or have a miscarriage—kids are arbitrary, anyway! Punch your belly, Emma. And just like that: fwoop Didya get shot by a Jesse Plemons cop? T’inquiètes, here comes Plemons to lick the hand—and bite it!—free of charge. We are no different than dogs. We can be just as messy. What an enlightening thesis. Life sucks. And then you die. And then you come back. There’s no sense of an irrational world of chance, as in Buñuel, or the outright freakish and ancient supernatural, as in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now or Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. In a Lanthimos film, a dog is a dog—and why not slice deeply into its forearm with a knife as it yelps. His creatures, like his films, are clayey inert objects, bereft of meaning (so are we, obviously), that one then injects, via monologue, with a purpose.

Ultimately, the greatest sin of Lanthimos’s films is their total disinterest in the question of love, how to earn it, how to keep it alive. He pretends some kind of bittersweetness that postures as What Love Really Is. Two key moments summarize Kindness: Dafoe, as the abusive and controlling Raymond, in cartoonish white Bermuda shorts, says to Plemons, who’s breaking up with him: “I don’t know what this is, but this is not love.” And that’s Lanthimos: 𝓈ℯ𝓍, love, bodies furiously jumping, violence, death, 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡, miscarriage reduced to just blood and discharge—all are mere acts that happen to people. Standing at a safe distance behind his camera, he takes not only the lovey-doveyness out of 𝓈ℯ𝓍, out of life, out of even the surreal, he takes the sting out, too.