Kinds of Kindness review: Trippy tale from the director of Poor Things needs a trim

Some of us are still getting our heads around that angular, absurd fantasy, for which the awesome Emma Stone collected a Best Actress Oscar. She deserved it too but is the world ready for another trippy Lanthimos joint? Maybe.

It’s worth remembering that Kinds of Kindness, a so-called “triptych fable” full of weird ideas and weirder protagonists, is the first original Lanthimos feature since 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

On Poor Things, everyone’s favourite Greek filmmaker had Tony McNamara adapting an Alasdair Gray novel. On The Favourite, McNamara and Deborah Davis collaborated on the screenplay. Here, the acclaimed director is back in the writing chair. So too is his old pal, Efthimis Filippou (The Lobster, Dogtooth).

These are important details. Lanthimos is an extraordinary manager of other people’s stories but it’s when he gets to tell his own that his films truly soar.

Kinds of Kindness is by no means his best work – there is, perhaps, too much of it, and the finished product lacks discipline. But there are flashes of brilliance.

It’s funny, tragic, difficult to stomach yet impossible to turn away from. It’s unlike anything else in cinemas

It is a film that tests its limits and toys with our expectations. It’s funny, tragic, difficult to stomach yet impossible to turn away from. It’s unlike anything else in cinemas, basically.

Some might compare Kinds of Kindness to The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. The truth is somewhere in between, and Lanthimos’s latest offering uses the same cast to tell three different stories, each one a little more disturbing than the last.

In the first tale, Jesse Plemons (the most valuable player here) portrays a troubled young professional named Robert Fletcher, whose sociopathic boss Raymond (a deeply unsettling Willem Dafoe) controls every aspect of his life. Poor Robert can barely dress himself in the morning without Raymond telling him which colour socks to wear.

His meals are planned; his marriage to Sarah (Hong Chau) was arranged. Raymond gets to decide whether they have any children and that should be the point at which Robert tells his boss where to shove it.

Instead, it’s after Raymond asks Robert to take another man’s life that our hapless protagonist finally puts his foot down. The boss subsequently turns his back on his nervous protege, and poor Robert is alarmed to discover that he is incapable of making any decisions for himself.

In the second tale, Plemons once again takes centre stage, this time playing an anxious police officer named Daniel whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) is missing at sea. Daniel’s best friends (Mamoudou Athie, Margaret Qualley) are worried about their pal. It gets worse after Liz finally returns, and Daniel convinces himself that his wife has been replaced by an imposter.

In the third sequence, Plemons and Stone are Andrew and Emily, a couple of recently-appointed cult members whose job is to find a woman who can raise the dead. A difficult task, and it hardly helps that Emily can’t keep away from the home she once shared with her controlling husband, Joseph (Joe Alwyn).

Tall tales there, and Lanthimos applies his usual tricks throughout. His characters exist in slippery, sideways worlds where nobody is happy; where common decency is a myth and where needy, manipulative humans are constantly seeking approval.

It’s a universe on the edge of collapse and it’s full of people whose lives have been destroyed by toxic, codependent relationships. That’s what makes Lanthimos’s film so compelling. It’s what holds it in place, even when it looks as if its creator has lost the run of himself.

‘Kinds of Kindness’ is Lanthimos at his most self-indulgent

And let’s be clear: Lanthimos, collaborating once again with Ireland’s Element Pictures and Dublin cinematographer Robbie Ryan, takes some big swings here.

Not all of them work out. His cinematic short stories would perhaps leave a bigger mark if he’d trimmed them down and tightened them up. The 164-minute runtime is pushing it, and Kinds of Kindness is Lanthimos at his most self-indulgent.

Thank goodness, then, for a committed A-list cast, who deliver their lines and control their roles in a way that this unique if decidedly uneven feature doesn’t always deserve. Entertaining and frustrating, in equal measure.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​