Yorgos Lanthimos presents “Kinds of Kindness”, an uneven triptych

For the third time in competition, the Greek director once again uses a strong formalism which delights his followers and always disenchants his detractors.

Screenplay Prize at Cannes for Killing of the Sacred Deer in 2017, Jury Prize and Queer Palm – Special Mention for The Lobster in 2015, but also the Un Certain Regard Prize for Canine in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos is a Festival favorite.

He is back with Kinds of Kindness, where he distills his acid vision of humanity in search of meaning into three different stories. The film is expected on screens on June 25, 2024.

With a high-class cast including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos plays with narrative subtleties that have enchanted many festival-goers won over in advance, and left on the edge of the way others.

In the first part, an employee tries to take control of his life, but comes up against constant opposition. The second story sees a man find his wife missing at sea, whom he does not recognize. In the last story, the weakest, a woman tries to find the truth in a religious group, but she turns out to be invested with the message she was looking for.

Whistled at the end of the projection, until the applause took over, with Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos still delivers as much, a consistency since his first performance in competition with The Lobster. If the filmmaker demonstrated his art of sophisticated images in his previous films, he calms down here, putting all his energy into a complex narrative form. First by telling three stories, then by giving different roles in the same context, to the same actors, finally, by playing traps where he likes to lose us, without necessarily finding us.



However, as Jean-Luc Godard said, “the important thing is not to understand, but that it is beautiful”. Kinds of Kindness is certainly so on many points, notably in the provision of Willem Dafoe, present in all three parts of the film. But there is a sort of descent into hell, each story proving weaker than the previous one. We find the recognizable style of Lanthimos who likes to linger on the gory and anatomical details of damaged, dislocated, broken bodies, like unstructured lives, in search of an inaccessible harmony, which, once achieved, turns out to be boring. Yorgos Lanthimos is therefore true to himself, but the surprise still operates, even if we can once again find him very formal.

Gender : Drama
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Actors: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, Susan Elle, Merah Benoit, Jess Weiss (II), Victoria Harris
Country : Ireland, Great Britain, United States
Duration : 2h44
Exit : June 26, 2024