Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Performer: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons
After the Golden Lion of Venice and the Oscar success of “Poor Creatures”, Yorgos Lanthimos made another film with almost the same team. “Kinds of Kindness” is three different stories. Each one stars the same actors, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons. The most interesting is the first study – a kind of satire of the modern corporate world. The story of a guy whose life – in matters big and small – is decided by his boss. He tells him what to eat (a man cannot be emaciated), how to dress, how to behave. He forbids him to have children and finally orders him to cause an accident in which another driver dies. Lanthimos portrays a world that strips people of their personality and takes away their very will and life. Unfortunately, it gets much worse later. In the second study, a man’s wife, who was considered missing, suddenly returns to him. But he becomes obsessed: he does not believe that the person who appeared on his doorstep is really his wife. In the third story, the heroine follows an evil cult leader in search of a woman who can resurrect the dead.
Lanthimos looks at those areas of life where one person gives power over himself to another person. In corporations, in marriage, in faith. I admit that the last two acts, full of sex, cruelty and surrealism, do not convince me. They lack discipline, sin with intellectual exaggeration and seem extremely absurd. “It is not our film that is absurd. The world is full of absurdities,” defends the director against similar accusations.
It’s worth watching this film and forming your own opinion about it. And besides, Lanthimos is Lanthimos – without a doubt a great personality in contemporary cinema.
