Yorgos Lanthimos returns with twisted triptych Kinds of Kindness — Cannes film review

Director Yorgos Lanthimos comes down from the Olympian Oscar success of The Favourite and last year’s Poor Things for the twisted triptych that is Kinds of Kindness. The shift in register is immediately apparent: this is a return to what was dubbed the Greek “weird wave”, even if the language is English and the stars are echt Hollywood: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons. Back as Lanthimos’s co-writer is Efthimis Filippou, his collaborator on previous Cannes prize-winners The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

For a film called Kinds of Kindness, benevolence is thin on the ground, Lanthimos and Filippou toying with their protagonists like fickle gods manipulating the fates of unsuspecting humans. In the first (and strongest) chapter their conduit is Dafoe’s Raymond, a wealthy boss who controls the life of Plemons’ Robert as if he were a Sims character, dictating his diet, reading and sex life with his wife Sarah (Hong Chau). Lanthimos may be mocking his very role as director when Raymond orders Robert to leave the room and start the scene again. Look a little deeper and you may see Raymond as a metaphor for the way corporations cultivate dependency and control our lives.

Words and images are rife with absurdist touches. Non sequiturs enter the conversation — sudden talk of palm weevils; strange framings and angles intrude — the camera focused on hands instead of faces during a conversation. The purposely stilted delivery of dialogue from Sacred Deer makes a comeback.

The second chapter is no less strange. Plemons is now a policeman pining for his wife Liz, who has been lost at sea, seeing her in criminal suspects whom he lovingly caresses “as if they just fucked for the first time”. When she turns up she is Emma Stone, here as in Poor Things playing a woman with memory loss. But is she Liz? Plemons should be elated, yet the shoe doesn’t quite fit. Watching Plemons’ cop cracking up, our thoughts turn to real-life concerns over law enforcement falling apart.

At this point, Kinds of Kindness starts to feel like bingeing three episodes of The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected or Black Mirror. Using the same actors in all sections heightens the sense of role-play and amplifies the stories’ dreamlike qualities. There are elements of Beckettian absurdity and Pinteresque power games. Everything is a little off but the cast sells it well, Plemons a particular standout. 

Things get really wacky in chapter three, with Plemons and Stone playing a Mulder and Scully-like duo on a quest for someone who can raise the dead. Stone drives and vapes violently, her purple Dodge Challenger screeching round corners. The absurd gets absurder: out-of-context shots of a hedgehog, sudden close-ups of a cockatiel, shrieking piano, eerie choral voices.

Dafoe goes full freak-show in heavy eyeliner and shocking-pink posing pouch, overseeing kinky sex games alongside Chau. The only glimpse of what might be called normality is an unsettling scene in which Stone encounters her estranged husband and daughter. Being a wife and mother seems to have become something shameful. Has she been seduced into an extreme alternative lifestyle by Dafoe’s cult leader? Before we can be sure, it all ends with a mordant cartoonish gag.

And after almost three hours, you may ask yourself: what does it all add up to? Let’s say it’s an off-kilter and not entirely satisfying meditation on the modern tendency to look for kindness in the wrong places: uncaring employers, failing public institutions, crackpot gurus. “Sweet dreams are made of this,” sings Annie Lennox on the soundtrack — and the undertone of irony has never been clearer. 

★★★☆☆

Cannes Film Festival continues to May 25, festival-cannes.com