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All 9 Yorgos Lanthimos Movies, Ranked
Where does Kinds of Kindness fit in the Greek Weird Wave provocateur’s filmography?
Unlike the filmmaker’s co-directed first feature, his solo-directed second is recognizably, even undeniably him: an enigmatic drama about three unnamed strangers — a plainclothes cop (Costas Xikominos), a photographer (Aris Servetalis), and a maid (Evangelia Randou) — who meet to perform mysterious reenactments of violent crimes in a small Greek vacation town, until the line between imitation and reality starts to blur. All the same, it’s not difficult to see what drew the director to the true story of two 18th-century cousins, Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz, never better) and Abigail Hill (Emma Stone, never better until her next film with Lanthimos), competing for the sapphic affections of a mentally and physically unwell monarch (Olivia Colman, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in a major and well-deserved upset). His deranged imagination is all over this vibrantly stylized journey of awakening, in which horny experiment Bella Baxter — a woman with the literal brain of a child — follows her libido to liberation, finding herself sexually and ideologically in the Victorian steampunk world beyond the gates of her gothic home/prison.
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