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There aren’t many filmmakers who have embraced the overtly absurd in the mainstream quite like Yorgos Lanthimos. After The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos reunites with collaborator Efthymis Filippou for the first time ever since The Killing of a Sacred Deer, marking a return to familiar territory for the Greek auteur – though his usual brand of weirdness certainly won’t land in the same way that his past two may have for most. Instead, you’re seeing  a return to the cruelty that perhaps made films like Dogtooth and The Lobster feel so provocative, but at a certain point, it also just gets exhausting in a way that Lanthimos has never been.

Kinds of Kindness is an anthology film: with three distinct segments all linked by the same cast playing different characters each time, and a mysterious figure named “R.M.F.” In one segment, Jesse Plemons portrays a loyal worker to a shady businessman portrayed by Willem Dafoe, who seems to have controlled every aspect of his own life. Another segment features a character portrayed by him suspecting that his long-missing wife, portrayed by Emma Stone, a mainstay for Lanthimos since The Favourite, is not actually the woman she loved most. The final segment, maybe the most bizarre of the bunch, revolves around a woman played by Emma Stone who abandoned her own family for a cult that craves sweat, on a search for someone whom she believes can resurrect the dead.

Of the general ensemble, Jesse Plemons stands heaps above the rest – having won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. As the movie ramps up the absurdity with each ongoing segment, the fact that Jesse Plemons remains so committed to playing a similar type of character is inevitably going to be the most entertaining thing in this bizarre anthology. But at his best, Lanthimos has always been able to bring out the best in his actors: in fact, seeing him reunite together with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley is a whole lot of fun because of what they bring to each of their own roles in every segment. But perhaps it’s knowing that they all feel like archetypes that make each performer work in their own way.

But as per usual with anthology films of this sort, there’s always one segment that stands out atop the rest. It also hurts in the case of this movie when that one segment just happens to be the very first one. It feels like Lanthimos is trying to make a distinct return to a brand of humour that he and co-writer Efythmis Filippou had distinctly established with Dogtooth and carried onward into The Lobster. If the movie were mostly built on that first segment, then it would perhaps be among Lanthimos’s best works – carrying the distinct absurdity that made his works stand out above most other contemporaries, though maybe without the profundity that made his best works effective at that.

With the anthology structure of Kinds of Kindness, the contrasting nature of each story only ever gives varying results. But in fact, they’re also disconnected in a way that only makes the film feel like it’s Lanthimos compiling entirely unfinished ideas that never really go anywhere. As a result of such, you also end up feeling the near three hour length. Yet even as Yorgos Lanthimos tries to amp up the absurdity of each segment’s own scenarios, it seems like every moment of it spells out the next – and then the wait for what’s to come forth is made very tedious. While there are funny moments sprinkled in every now and then, it also makes evident Lanthimos’s greatest weaknesses, in that these supposedly “provocative” moments never really offer much insight – more so just a sense of nihilism that only gets stale as it goes on.

Viewers who are perhaps most familiar with Yorgos Lanthimos through The Favourite or Poor Things certainly will not get the Greek auteur working within the same mode. But even for those who have been following his career since Dogtooth as he moved into English-language territory with The Lobster, maybe the most disappointing thing to come to with Kinds of Kindness is that even the absurdity feels tame in comparison. Perhaps that also might be the aftereffect of Yorgos Lanthimos moving comfortably within the realm of studio filmmaking, but even though I’ve never always been the biggest fan of his work, I could not help but feel like I was missing the overt weirdness I always associated with him.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Searchlight Pictures.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay by Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Produced by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kasia Malipan
Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie
Premiere Date: May 17, 2024
Running Time: 165 minutes