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Yorgos Lanthimos Is Not Your Friend
Poor Things was an empowerment fantasy. The director’s latest film, Kinds of Kindness, is a return to his primary interest — control.
The frankness of the sexual content — which begins with Bella’s innocent explorations of her own body, progresses to her voracious pursuit of what she calls “furious jumping” with a louche lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and eventually brings her to work in a Parisian brothel — kicked off arguments about the degree to which Poor Things is mired in the male gaze. His movies have the brain-burrowing quality of an insomniac’s thought spiral and are so insistently off-kilter that the Greek Weird Wave, the movement he’s sometimes described as being a part of, feels less likea trend in national cinema and more like a summary of how his distinct sensibility has filtered through to some of his peers. Lanthimos shoots the encounter in a series of frank, static shots that leave nothing to the imagination until the end, when the film cuts to Papoulia’s character in profile, her brother visible only in the reflection of the mirror as he moves above her, her face contorted in an involuntary grimace.
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