Cannes 2024 Short Take: Kinds of Kindness is a Triple Serving of Surreal

Once again Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos serves up a darkly comical, scalding, absurdist, deviant portrait of humanity. Kinds of Kindness is a triple serving of surreal. The film is three stories, featuring the same actors and similar themes - control, consent, religion, marriage, sex, and dogs. In the first, Jesse Plemons plays an office worker whose boss dictates his every move, including what he will eat and when he will have sex. In the next segment, Plemons plays a cop whose wife disappears but when she returns, he suspects she’s not his wife but a double. The wife is played by Emma Stone, who won a best acting Oscar for Lanthimos’ last film Poor Things. In the third film, she plays the follower of a cult leader, who has tasked her with finding a mysterious woman who can raise the dead.

At two hours forty-five minutes, Kinds of Kindness is Lanthimos’ longest film and the question is, how much strange can you stomach? I reached my threshold when a character cut off a body part and served it as a meal with accompanying vegetables. Of course when you step into the Lanthimos world, you sign up for all of this – the Variety review called him a pioneering member of the Greek Weird Wave. This film will baffle you in ways good and bad and eventually it does become a test of patience. Adding to your stress is composer Jerskin Fendrix’s use of pianos and choirs. Kinds of Kindness has no interest in being liked. At the screening I attended, there was loud booing. Which might satisfy the director as much as applause.

The film played in competition at the 77^th Cannes Film Festival.