Director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career for himself showing us, as Beetlejuice's Lydia Deetz would put it, the strange and unusual. From his sophomore feature Dogtooth onward, Lanthimos has taken a sick and, frankly, sensational sense of pride in giving the world a harsh bite of intolerable cruelty, the crushing blows of connection, and what can come from fate’s unforgiving hand. But in the filmmaker’s eyes, this is all par for the course.
His spotlight on the disturbing is not the window dressing, but the window itself. “I just can't help it,” Lanthimos tells IGN. “I just find it normal to be preoccupied with what is very evident in our daily lives and in our world.
And it's weird for me to see that other people do not delve [into] these kinds of issues and matters. It's a matter of how you approach it and how you do that. But other than that, I don't find my films strange.
” You, dear reader, will probably find Lanthimos’ new picture Kinds of Kindness to be at least a little bit strange. It’s a decidedly darker turn than the last film he made, Poor Things , which followed a sheltered young woman trying her hand at exploring the world and what life has to offer (to put it as mildly as possible). But the writer-director laughs when I mention the notion that Poor Things was more, well, normal.
“It’s funny to me—in a positive way—that people say Poor Things is less of that because I was trying to make it for 12 years and everybody thought I was crazy,.
