Director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his roots in the Greek Weird Wave with his latest film, "Kinds of Kindness," a three-part anthology. This film follows his Oscar-winning hits "The Favourite" and "Poor Things," marking a stumbling victory lap in his career. It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes.
But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything. I take it as a heartening sign of nerve that Lanthimos even went into production with this script, co-written with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou. As with Lanthimos’ previous works, we learn the rules of societal engagement as we go.
In the first fable, Plemons plays a longtime employee of a wealthy man of business (business unspecified), assigned by the boss to execute mysterious and potentially lethal tasks such as ramming someone’s car and killing the driver. This underlying has been stripped of all agency, with his employer (Willem Dafoe) dictating his every daily move, requiring him to fornicate with his wife (Hong Chau) at a specific time of day and laying out a clinically precise nutritional regimen. Things are even more insidious underneath the surface.
The worm turns, eventually. But in Lanthimos’ icily calm depiction of masters, servants and a heartless status quo, there’s no wiggle room. The actors play new characters in f.
