Ever since its Cannes premiere, I haven’t really written much about “Kinds of Kindness”. The film seems to have been met with a shrug by critics and audiences — 64 on Metacritic. The Daily Beast actually had a headline that read “Is 'Kinds of Kindness' Too Weird for Audiences to Handle?” Yes, “Poor Things” this is not.
As mentioned, the film premiered at Cannes where I reviewed and give it a “B+” grade. Lanthimos’s unnerving, amusing and non-conformist film harkens back to his more old-school surreal work of the 2010s. Set in an alternate reality where ultra-realism and fantasy co-exist, it’s an anthology composed of three short stories with the same actors playing different parts in each story.
It helps that Lanthimos’ longtime screenwriting collaborator, Efthimis Filippo, is back here. They actually wrote the script around 10 years ago and finally decided to shoot it during post-production VFX work on “Poor Things.” Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe are all great here.
“Kinds of Kindness” is currently playing in 500 locations nationwide. Who’s seen it? I’d love to gather up thoughts from our readers about this very divisive film, which, although flawed, I found to have these highly engrossing and cruelly disturbing moments.