Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

[therewillbeblus]

Yorgos Lanthimos has announced his next film, AND, starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley (no, this is not a retitle of Poor Things, though the cast is pretty similar!)

[domino harvey]

Yorgos Lanthimos has announced his next film, AND, starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley (no, this is not a retitle of Poor Things, though the cast is pretty similar!)

Set footage of Stone dancing with abandon in a parking lot

[The Narrator Returns]

Yorgos Lanthimos' second film in half a year, Kinds of Kindness

I like Lanthimos but I hated Poor Things on-sight and even more as I kept thinking about it, this looks much more up my alley in every way, especially visually and in the amount of Margaret Qualley.

[domino harvey]

Interesting that it's going for a summer release. I guess they don't smell another Oscar hit since they didn't save it for the fall (unless he has a third one coming up?!)

[The Narrator Returns]

Has a single-director triptych movie like this ever been an Oscars success? I'm sure Searchlight remembers The French Dispatch getting goose-egged and doesn't want to try and fail like that again.

[domino harvey]

Off the top of my head, De Sica's Ieri, oggi, domani won Best Foreign Film and is similarly a single-director triptych composition

[therewillbeblus]

Not sure if this counts, but Babel?

[erok910]

If Babel counts it seems like we're veering into a sort of hyperlink cinema, opening the door to Crash and the like.

[The Narrator Returns]

I was thinking specifically movies where one story plays out in its entirety and is followed by another (and then another), so Amores Perros would count but not Babel or Crash or the like.

[erok910]

I felt I understood, but one random example off the top of my head is I'm Not There. Also The Ballad of Buster Scruggs did get nominated for screenplay (and a few others) as I recall. Will return to add more as I can. These might not fit perfectly.

[Walter Kurtz]

Has a single-director triptych movie like this ever been an Oscars success?

A single-director sextych movie (with multiple writers) once won an Oscar nomination. Rossellini's Paisan.

I am posting this because I never before uttered nor written the word 'sextych' and I guess a part of me somewhere hidden until now always wanted to.

[MichaelB]

My wife and I will be first in the queue - you'd have to go right back to The Duke of Burgundy a decade ago to find a film that she adored as unreservedly as Poor Things - but I couldn't help but notice the absence of Tony McNamara on the screenwriting front, and he's a major reason why we both liked The Favourite and Poor Things so much. But we shall see.

[therewillbeblus]

Fans of The Favourite and Poor Things who didn't love Lanthimos' previous work may want to enter with caution. This is an omnibus of Killing of a Sacred Deer-style cringe-inducing anti-fables that definitely challenge audiences looking for ‘more’ - but I found so much there. It's funny and sad and deep, and though it can come off like rando surreal fluff at times, there's definitely a wealth of connective tissue between the episodes. I’m a sucker for stories about nebulous social fear fucking with us, and this delivers that in spades, mostly through elisions and on a tonal level, gesturing at great themes that we, and the characters, just cannot grasp to the degree we crave... the folly of humanity. Plus at bare minimum, it's just a showcase for Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons to shine even brighter. I loved it.

[Finch]

I really liked The Favorite but absolutely couldn't stand Killing of a Sacred Deer so yeah I'm probably not going to get a lot out of this and 3 hours of this sounds punishing.

[therewillbeblus]

You may find the structure of the film makes length more bearable, at least

[Mr Sausage]

I haven't seen Killing of a Sacred Deer, but adored The Lobster (and The Favourite and Poor Things of course). Worth seeing as soon as possible?

[therewillbeblus]

I'd say so. I'll be curious to see if you or others have concrete thoughts to lay out. The film's themes are finely-drawn and the relationships between the stories are quite elliptical. I don't know how to translate my ideas on this one.

[therewillbeblus]

I haven't read too much critical reflection on this film, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned is its preoccupation with dom-sub relationships in a broad sense. These characters are often drawn into playing with power dynamics, not just with people but places and things - from water to magic, the possible and the impossible - spawned by loneliness and a craving for order and belongingness. The first and third stories are more clearly related, but the second one is starting to make more sense as a bridge, even if its meaning is more deliberately elusive than the others. There are many ways to read it, but I think characters' actions in switching roles can be explained just as well by a protective response to being made vulnerable as it can a self-consciously untrusting reading from inherent social disconnect. These people seek out and switch their roles fluidly based on provocations of comfort and discomfort, and the film operates similarly in how it treats its audience - self-reflexively moving between languorous and agile, anti-climactic and mini-cathartic beats. I'm starting to think this is far more brilliant than it lets on; a movie that hardly resembles our lives and yet speaks to what life feels like better than most.

[domino harvey]

A Lacanian reading of the film - didn’t get very far because he drops a big spoiler like a minute in (sooooo… spoiler alert), but I like his other videos doing close readings of philosophy texts

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for sharing! I liked that deeper reading, especially since it compliments my own. And yes, there is zero reason to watch this before you see the film. It spoils everything

[The Narrator Returns]

I don't know that I have much deep analysis for this besides the obvious doubling motif (similar to Lanthimos' short Nimic, the first story in particular), which is a funny negation of what would seem to have to be a movie about tripling. That's about where I stand with the whole thing, I dunno if it really gave me much food for thought but it made me laugh and it seems that Lanthimos' point is to undermine the attempts to take it too seriously. That meant I was pretty frustrated by how the second story devolves from a strong idea into "so random!" provocation, and it took awhile for the third to win me back (the first is the only story I'd call a complete thought in the vein of Killing of a Sacred Deer), but then Stone somehow located genuine heartbreak in this cruel exercise (the only other person to do so is Hunter Schafer for exactly one line) and I was unexpectedly impressed, especially when Lanthimos and Stone steer it straight back into mean-spirited absurdity. It's an undeniable problem that I found roughly one hour of this to be pretty tedious but the bigger picture won me over, and you can't feel bad about such a strong Jesse Plemons showcase. Despite my previous doubts about Lanthimos' newfound awards-darling status meaning anything for this, I think Searchlight could push Plemons uphill for Best Actor and they should try, not just because I think it would be really funny to do so.

And it's so so so SO much better than Poor Things, whose existence might only be worthwhile as a means to lead his new fans straight into this roach motel (and some of them will even like it there!). Robbie Ryan is such a fantastic DP when he's not shackled to rainbow-puke backdrops and the worst lens choices known to man.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I also liked The Lobster, The Favourite, and Poor Things so seeing this one is a matter of when not if.

There are many ways to read it, but I think characters' actions in switching roles can be explained just as well by a protective response to being made vulnerable as it can a self-consciously untrusting reading from inherent social disconnect.

This puts me in mind of Alps which is one of my favorites of YL's films so this is a promising observation.

[Mr Sausage]

Like apparently everyone else here, I'm not sure what to say about this one. I enjoyed its upendings, its refusal to commit to a pre-made or readily identifiable framework, orthodoxy, or conceptual structure (making it the polar opposite of Poor Things in a way, since that earlier movie had a clear feminist framework), and its endless weirdness. I love to encounter movies this strange and individual. I have mostly random thoughts:

I can't think of a movie outside of David Lynch that takes dreams so seriously. One is outright prophetic, another quasi-prophetic, and the other is...potentially a description of reality, or a reality, but certainly an ethos and a driving force behind a character's whole being. The film cheerfully acknowledges this at the outset with the Eurythmics. Dream, fantasy, and reality are kinda contiguous.

Then there's a title which, because of the repetition, can mean either "ways of being kind" or "types of being". There is a lot of both: we see many forms of 'kindness' that we wouldn't normally associated with the word, but which are an odd and twisted form of it. And we see a number of bizarre lifestyles and identities that the film not only declines to judge, but uses in order to elicit facile judgements and received opinions it can use against us, as a way to surprise, shock, and provoke.

Spoiler

The clearest example is the last story, where our preconception of both cults and families leads us to badly misjudge who the manipulators and rapists are.

One form of being the film consistently emphasizes is polyamory--maybe even healthy polyamory, tho' it can be hard to tell when so much in the characters' lives are unaccountable or fraught.

There is a recurrent motif about consumption. Food and drink plays a (sometimes large) part in all three stories, from the boss who wants Plemons to eat more in the first part, to the complex food issues of the second, to the water of the third--bodily needs is an important theme throughout the movie. Not sure exactly what it signifies, or how it intertwines with sex, but it's there.

[therewillbeblus]

I can't think of a movie outside of David Lynch that takes dreams so seriously. One is outright prophetic...

Spoiler

I like how Plemons (arguably the most 'pathetic' character) dreams of facing Dafoe while eating a sandwich in the first story in which R.M.F. dies, only for R.M.F. to be safely eating a sandwich at the end of the third story after a potential messiah (arguably the polar opposite of Plemons' character in the first story) dies.

There's a lot of fun, ironic mirroring going on, which is where I think repeat viewings will be helpful, especially in getting to the nuggets of that middle story - caught between two in which characters seem to have clearer aims, and so arguably the closest to most human fear-based, lonely, banal lives than its bookends.

I also noticed what felt like straight-up nods to The Leftovers, beyond just theme -

Spoiler

particularly Emma Stone's monologue about the island run by dogs, where the score suddenly began to resemble a Max Richter piece from the show too! Its purpose is near-identical to the finale of that series, showcasing the theme of how desperate we are to have our lonely narratives accepted by another, regardless of objective truth.

[TMDaines]

Anyone else having a pretty good time, then find the third episode a bit of a mess and a drag?