Forget the title, this weird and wacky anthology focuses on humanity's worst impulses A fter his (relatively) accessible sex comedy Poor Things , Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos is back at peak freaky. The director’s third straight collaboration with Emma Stone, who won an Oscar for her performance in Poor Things as a grown woman with the brain of a foetus, is being billed as a “triptych fable”. That’s a suitably ambiguous description for a restlessly provocative 165-minute epic that is essentially three films in one.
One contains casual cannibalism that will make you wince; another follows a sex cult whose members fetishise the amount of water in the human body. So yes, the dial is definitely set to “peak freaky”. All three stories feature the same crack company of actors – Stone and her Poor Things co-stars Willem Dafoe and Marquaret Qualley, plus Lanthimos novices Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie – but they play different characters each time.
The only common denominator is the peripheral presence of R.M.F.
(Yorgos Stefanakos), a mysterious non-verbal character who invites us to find parallels in the triptych. These comparisons are likely to be highly subjective, however, because Lanthimos offers no easy answers or clear moral takeaways. Kinds Of Kindness might leave you feeling exasperated – or it might keep you dissecting its themes for weeks to come.
Emma Stone and Joe Alwyn in ‘Kinds Of Kindness’. CREDIT: Atsushi Nishijima The first stor.
