Emma Stone recently won an Oscar for Poor Things and now she’s presenting the next brutally bizarre trip at the Cannes Festival. Kinds of Kindness, however, is a completely different beast
Sweet Dreams booms over the opening credits and at the press screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the audience bursts into applause as if Annie Lennox herself were standing in front of them. To put it with a certain poetry: The audience for the new Emma Stone film was really pumped.
Yorgos Lanthimos made his new film Kinds of Kindness with half the cast of his Oscar hit Poor Things and some pretty sick ideas. In it, Emma Stone plays three different roles in three different episodes, which add up to almost three hours. But you’re not in for a classic Emma Stone vehicle, and by classic I mean something like her last movie, in which she was given a baby brain transplant
Kinds of Kindness consists of three films with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons
Back to Kinds of Kindness, in which Yorgos Lanthimos wrote the screenplay with Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth) for the first time since the cinematic icebox The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The difference to his previous two Stone films Poor Things or The Favourite is immediately noticeable. The historical settings give way to the present, where the sun is shining but it’s still chilly. And Kinds of Kindness is actually not a pure Emma Stone film, but at least as much a Jesse Plemons vehicle, of which there should clearly be more.
Three episodes, mini feature films in their own right, so to speak, follow one another.
Watch the trailer for Kinds of Kindness:
In the first, Plemons (Killers of the Flower Moon) plays a man who lets his boss (Willem Dafoe) control his entire life: From the woman (Hong Chau) he lives with to the number of Anna Karenina pages he reads each day. When he tries to seize the power of choice, he learns the pitfalls of freedom.
Episode 2 shows Plemons as a policeman who comes face to face with his wife (Emma Stone), who was thought to be missing. But he harbors a dark suspicion: What if he is dealing with a doppelganger? Last but not least, in the final segment, Plemons and Stone play a couple looking for a chosen one for a religious cult
Laughs and shocks alternate diligently
With each episode, Kinds of Kindness takes on darker shades, so that at some point the humorous facets can only be described as deep black and dry as a fart. This is not a diss. Kinds of Kindness produces some of the funniest punchlines I’ve had the pleasure of chuckling at so far this cinema year. The ruthlessness with which Lanthimos slams his sometimes repulsive, sometimes absurd ideas in our faces makes even the weaker gags explode. I could write a thousand words about how Willem Dafoe wears pants, briefs or nothing at all in this movie, but I’d rather not. Watching it is much more fun than writing about it
(Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness)
Lanthimos and Filippou delve into various human depths in search of kindness, garnished with the odd severed body part. This lacks the playful tone with which sawed-open ribcages were passed around in Poor Things. We are back to a Lanthimos whose characters resemble a test subject in a sadistic experiment at the worse moments. At such moments, it quickly became rather quiet in the Cannes auditorium.
In its almost three hours, Kinds of Kindness has a few laughs and even more shocks, but ultimately also seems arbitrary, bloated and neither funny nor shocking enough for its running time. At one point I felt like I was trapped in a Bizarro version of TikTok, swiping from one Lanthimos conceit trimmed for reach to the next. The only salvation is to chop off your own thumb. Which, incidentally, is what a character in Kinds of Kindness does. And then the bit of finger gets fried. Sweet dreams .
