Cannes 2024: Kinds of Kindness is a dull provocation without bite

★ | Yorgos Lanthimos

A disclaimer is worthwhile. I haven’t enjoyed a single film by director Yorgos Lanthimos in the past. If you have, you probably will enjoy Kinds of Kindness as well. While closer to his early works, meaning that it’s more violent and juvenile than The Favourite, it decidedly looks like a Lanthimos picture.

He is one of the artists where I can agree that his films are ostensibly well directed and often exceptionally acted. Yet I haven’t enjoyed myself with any of them. I find them dull in the way that I find kids who’ve just learned to swear dull. The initial shock of hearing that first expletive is certainly novel, but after that, realizing they haven’t figured out how to string them into something original, it gets tedious. Such is the case with Kinds of Kindness, three short films strung together with flimsy themes of consent and abuse, yet without a single original or witty thing to say.

Instead of digging deeper into his themes, Lanthimos does what he always does. He goes for shock value – for three hours – and I can’t imagine anyone not growing numb about it. There’s sex, which Lanthimos plays up for laughs and grossness, like a teenager would. There’s violence, often towards animals, depicted in long, unflinching close-ups. But because we start from a place of strangeness, it doesn’t feel like much of anything. From the moment we hear the stilted dialog and see the robotic performances, each meant to heighten the sense of unease, we can’t go back to a baseline, because normality is already askew. When things get weirder, it’s already expected. The question becomes, how weird will it get, and could it get there any sooner?

The trio of shorts are all cut from the same cloth: A man suffers and loves to suffer at the hands of his controlling employer; a husband believes his wife, found after a tragic accident at sea, is not who she claims to be; two cultists search for a potential messiah in the heartlands. They are tales of power, promises, lies, and sex. The big picture reminds me of the 2001 film Storytelling, by Todd Solonz, which explored power dynamics, consent, and the eroding lines between fact and fiction just as acerbically. Only Solonz’s film is a full hour shorter. Kindness takes its time with each short, and around the halfway point, I began to wonder how many more false starts I could take.

Each story features the same players, and they’re all uniformly great. Jesse Plemons is a treat at playing downtrodden men who are just waiting to boil over. Emma Stone continues to delight as she subverts every expectation the audience may have of her. Willem Dafoe can be funny and malicious in the same scene without breaking a sweat. Hong Chau continues to be exceptional at everything she does. This is a cast that is so tuned in to the material they’re working with, it comes out like second nature. I believed each of them in their parts, even when I didn’t care for the story they’re in.

It would be a lie to say there isn’t a single good thing about Kinds of Kindness. The first story, featuring Plemons as the long-suffering test subject to Dafoe’s whims, is easily the best of the bunch. Had it been released on its own, I could easily point to it as my favorite Lanthimos story to date. But it’s tied to the two other shorts, both meandering and aimless, that it loses any power it may have held. It becomes collateral damage in a film that doesn’t know when to call it quits.

Yet still, Lanthimos continues to captivate audiences. So who knows what I’m missing. Maybe this is what others felt like when I raved about the latest Wes Anderson. Perhaps they, too, saw something handsomely produced, yet felt nothing.