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‘Kinds Of Kindness’ Review: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Latest Is Puzzling, Brilliant, Funny … And Not Easy To Like – Cannes Film Festival
What is Yorgos Lanthimos telling us in his movie Kinds of Kindness starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons.
It is a master-servant relationship developed in a different setting in the third story, RMF Eats a Sandwich, where Stone and Plemons play agents and devotees of a manipulative guru – Dafoe, of course – who sends them on missions to find a supposed miracle worker who can bring the dead back to life. Lanthimos is not interested in the uncanny so much as the ominous, an atmosphere underlined in all three stories with a jabbing piano score by Jerskin Fendrix and emphasized by cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s alternating lenses, wacky angles, extreme close-ups and a repeating motif of gleaming surfaces. Of course, the attention to set detail means you always know exactly where you are in a Lanthimos film: the flower arrangement on an occasional table, a maze of overstuffed beige couches, or the spread of wasteland visible from a window tell the stories of the people in this excruciatingly tidy house, this dazzlingly glazed office, this murkily-purposed institution.
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