Yorgos Lanthimos invites us into his world with the triptych ‘Kinds of Kindness‘ (2024). The format of the short-medium format film collection is not entirely new. Of course, we know him from the small screens with illustrious precedents such as ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ or ‘Tales from the Crypt’, but also from the creations for the big screens by directors from Jim Jarmusch to Cristian Mungiu. The world of Yorgos Lanthimos is that of parables loaded with symbols, of absurdity combined with the horror genre, of extreme experiences anchored in a confusingly familiar immediate reality. The three films that make up ‘Kinds of Kindness‘ are linked by several common thematic elements (individual will in contrast to social control, the relativity of the independence of individual actions, the presence of death as an element of reality rather than a metaphysical threat. The stronger ones belong to the style and the cinematography: the same group of actors, characters with similar names or initials, a continuous soundtrack that combines the sometimes inharmonious piano with church hymns, alluding to another, holier, Trinity. As in the case of the brothers Coen, Lanthimos‘ (and co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou‘s) characters are bizarre and rarely invite sympathy.
All three stories take place in immediate American reality, although any localization is carefully avoided. In the first episode, Robert, an employee of a corporation based in a metropolis, is under the total control of his boss, Raymond. He dictates his daily schedule, what to wear, what to eat and drink, when to have or not have relations with his wife. On the day Raymond asks him to commit a murder, Robert hesitates and tries to refuse. Can a bird that has lived a long time in a cage return to free life? In the second story, the policeman Daniel mourns the disappearance at sea of Liz, an oceanographer. After a while, she returns after being found on a remote island. But is she the real Liz? Some details do not match. Maybe they are changes due to the trauma the woman went through. Daniel becomes more and more convinced that she is a hoax. Those around him consider him paranoid. Maybe they are right. Events evolve into madness. The third story has as the main heroine, Emily, a woman who left her family to join a bizarre cult dominated by the all-powerful Omi. The task received from them is to search for a woman who has supernatural powers, including healing any wound or disease and even raising the dead. But she too falls victim to the brutality of the world she is trying to leave and is cast out by the cult. But what if he finds the healer? Will she save herself and rehabilitate herself in the eyes of the community that had rejected her?
Quotations and symbols abound in the three stories, from Cinderella to the films of Stanley Kubrick. Lanthimos constantly attacks the taboos without destroying them. Cruel parody is ultimately a form of admiration. Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone were with the director in his previous film, ‘Poor Things’. It will be interesting to see if these collaborations continue and where they will evolve. They are joined in this film by Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley and a few more actors with roles in each of the three films. The atmosphere in ‘Kinds of Kindness‘ is that of a theater performance by a troupe playing with the same actors, in the same evening, three different plays in one act. Black and macabre theater, farces and tragic comedies about the cruelty of life and dancing with death. A show signed by Yorgos Lanthimos.