Did you see Poor Things and/or The Favourite? Too out-there, just right, or not edgy enough?
Your answer will have a bearing on whether director Yorgos Lanthimos's latest should go on the watchlist. This surreal (and often unhinged) black comedy is, putting it mildly, not for everyone - and makes Poor Things and The Favourite look like mainstream fare by comparison.
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Running for close to three hours and with head-scratching from start to finish, it's a triptych of stories that sees Lanthimos reuniting with many of the gang from his aforementioned works, including Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Joe Alwyn, Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, and the Dublin-based Element Pictures, joined this time around by Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie. All the actors play multiple roles.
In the first story, an architect (Jesse Plemons) is at the mercy of his boss's (Willem Dafoe) every whim. In the second, a husband (Plemons) thinks his air-crash surviving wife (Emma Stone) has been replaced by someone else. In the third, two members of a cult (Stone and Plemons) are on a quest.
If Kinds of Kindness was one plot for 164 minutes, it would be an ordeal to rival an airport in July, but the three-way split doesn't test the resolve in the same way. Issues of identity, belonging, and control abound, and the viewer's question "Where is this going?" comes up like clockwork in a film that revels in unpredictability. You can see why the actors wanted to sign up for the three-for-one test and the performances are all CV-enhancing (Plemons won Best Actor at Cannes), but punters may struggle to feel an emotional connection with the characters. Is that a comment on the distance between us in modern life? Now, you may well have a different theory entirely.
In a slippy study of strange people, one mystery here trumps all others: how has this movie landed as part of the summer schedule?
