July 8, 2024 · Watch the official trailer
As has been the case in Hollywood for several years now, the Fourth of July weekend was filled with franchise sequels and reboots.
Families flocked to cinemas for “Despicable Me 4” while fans of classic action-comedies loaded up Netflix for the fourth installment of the Eddie Murphy-led “Beverly Hills Cop” series.
In rarer and rarer occurrences, authentic and original filmmaking seems to become a lost art in the summer months and even celebrated auteurs and Oscar winners aren’t able to drive audiences to the theaters.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos – fresh off his award-winning, twisted take on Frankenstein’s monster with last year’s “Poor Things” – returns with a comparatively more grounded, yet equally unsettling anthology film, “Kinds of Kindness,” which debuted in moderate release to little fanfare this past weekend.
Led by two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, and Margaret Qualley, “Kindness” is a bizarre, reserved, and strange piece of cinema that will probably prove to be too outlandish for a majority of moviegoers but ardent cinephiles who are fans of Lanthimos’ eccentricities should find “Kindness” a more restrained, thought-provoking effort.
The film is split into three distinct 50-minute segments, each with its own unique tale and characters though the same lead cast is featured in all three parts as each segment becomes even more bizarre and twisted than the last.
“Kindness” follows a man without choice longing for freedom from a predetermined life path, a cop questioning his wife’s return from an apparent drowning, and a woman determine to find a specific person destined to be a prodigious spiritual leader.
The core of “Kindness” is veteran character actor turned breakout star Plemons, who keeps things from going too off the rails with a very stoic, yet nuanced turn that helps audiences feel like all the strangeness happening on screen is relatively normal. This is especially true in the ways Plemons’ matter-of-fact line delivery and cadence make the characters he plays feel as if events are completely mundane, everyday occurrences as he is required to cause a car crash, for example.
There’s a fluidity to the ways Plemons ebbs and flows his characters over the course of the entire film with his hand firmly on an emotional volume meter that never really rises above five but is ever so slightly tweaked to the moment.
Conversely, so much of Stone’s raw, magnetic performance lies within her demonstrative eyes that keeps audiences’ attention while Lanthimos prods her to do increasingly strange things in each segment of the film. While she has been her director’s muse for several films now, Stone has a much smaller, more subdued role to play here with the focus largely gravitating towards Plemons.
Dafoe serves largely as a background player in “Kindness,” but the weight and gravitas he brings to “Kindness” to emphasize the strangeness make him functionally the film’s structural backbone, especially in the first and third segments.
“Kindness” is also the first film in which young star Qualley is able to showcase the breadth and depth of her acting talent, even going so far as to play twins in the same segment. The ways in which she’s able to transform into four uniquely distinctive characters within short periods of time prove her vast potential as a lead actress.
The film’s cinematography from Robbie Ryan is muted and unobtrusive, giving “Kindness” more of a nostalgic, lived-in feel that often has the anthology seeming to be a series of fever dreams from the eccentric auteur.
“Kindness” is unlikely to be heralded come awards season like Lanthimos’ prior works, due to the timing of the film’s release, its underwhelming popularity in theaters and the likelihood that Searchlight Pictures might put their weight behind a fall release like indie dramedy “A Real Pain.”
“Kinds of Kindness” is far from an easy crowd-pleaser, but those who are attuned to the avant-garde oddities of Lanthimos’ filmmaking style will appreciate both the quality of the cinema as well as the depth and strangeness of the acting performances that make the film worth seeking out in theaters.
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