Kinds of Kindness – a review

Kinds of Kindness is the latest curiosity from Yorgos Lanthimos, the acclaimed director of The Lobster (2015), The Favourite (2018), and Poor Things (2023). 

This black comedy triptych unfolds through three distinct yet complementary stories, featuring the same ensemble cast: Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, each tackling different roles.

To label this anthology film anything other than an “odd, thought-provoking, and grotesque layer cake” would be a disservice to its intricate nature. The film provides a twisted yet nuanced take on the complexities of desire and the fundamental drivers of human existence: life, death, sex, and food. While it may not be an easy watch, its darkly poetic exploration of these themes is undeniably powerful, strange, and confrontationally human, as perhaps only the absurd can be.

The first tale explores the challenges of free will through the story of a man (Jesse Plemons) who agrees to follow every directive given by his boss (Willem Dafoe), including decisions about his weight, the food he eats, and even whom he marries.

In the second tale, Jesse Plemons plays a man whose wife (Emma Stone) is missing at sea. When she is miraculously rescued, he becomes consumed by paranoia, doubting whether she is truly his wife and demanding she go to extreme, cannibalistic lengths to prove herself.

In the final tale, two cult members (Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone) who only drink the tears of their leaders (Willem Dafoe and Hong Chau) hunt for a girl who can bring people back to life (Margaret Qualley).

Although each story is distinct, they are unified into one twisted, unsettling experience by their common aesthetics, paranoid atmosphere, and preoccupation with desire and consumption. Part of the film’s barbed yet subtle beauty lies in the growing sense of the uncanny as each actor takes on a new role. The visual style constantly toys with the line between absurdity and grotesqueness. A standout recurring technique is the use of shot composition that cuts off people’s heads during key dialogue, adding a discomforting sense of disorientation.

Each story makes folly of our desires with Lanthimos’s characteristic black humour. Humanity’s eccentricities, taken to an extreme, absurd place, are the butt of the joke, whether it’s the human propensity to be overwhelmed and immobilised by freedom, our tendency to desperately want something only to lose interest once we have it, or the tragedy of getting what we want only to squander it.

Of course, these interpretations offer neat, allegorical, Aesop-like readings of the three stories. Viewers should remember that, like many absurdist texts, this film illuminates human nature by starkly contrasting our search for meaning with a seemingly meaningless universe. These explorations of human folly and desire are not moral judgments, but rather challenging questions presented to us in their rawest, sometimes bloodiest, and always most unsettling form.

After each story, nothing is neatly wrapped up, and everything remains open to interpretation. This ideological complexity makes the film both confusing and rich in meaning. Yet, at its core, the film’s message may be surprisingly simple: existence is undeniably strange, perhaps impossible to fully understand, yet we have our constants – life, death, sex, and food. •

Ruby Lowenstein is a writer, critic, and producer. She holds a BA with Honours in Cinema and an MA in Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Melbourne. 

Ruby has worked in the arts and media sector since 2017 and has a passion for all things cinema, art, and literature.