“Sicko Yorgos is back,” declared our film critic Bilge Ebiri after seeing Lanthimos’s latest, Kinds of Kindness , which premiered this week in competition at Cannes. This film feels definitively closer to the director’s pitch-black, degradation-filled Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer than it does to his more recent Poor Things and The Favourite , both of which offer up a semblance of hopefulness about the state of humanity . There’s no such assurance in Kinds of Kindness, which is an anthology of abject debasement that comprises three parts, all starring the same actors in a variety of roles: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn , and Mamoudou Athie, plus cameos from Hunter Schafer, among others.
Plemons is the only actor who plays a lead role in all three sections, each of which explores themes of control, obedience, free will, cult-like idolatry, and the strange societal mores that most of us follow without questioning in a desperate attempt to belong to something, to be loved. His characters here are tormented and lost, one compelled by a godlike father figure to run over an innocent stranger, another convinced their wives are imposters, and, in two of the three segments, sexually and emotionally obsessed with Dafoe. The day after the film’s premiere, I sat down with Lanthimos and Plemons in a hotel room set up with some very intense microphones and cameras to talk about Kinds of Kindness.
Yorgos Lanthimos: It.