'Kinds of Kindness' Review: Forced Weirdness by Lanthimos

What disturbs the master of shock Yorgos Lanthimos? General respect. The provocateur's last two films, “Poor Things” and “The Favorite,” surprised even longtime Lanthimos fans (including me) by racking up 21 Academy Award nominations and two actress awards for the leads. Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, establishing him as one of the best directors since George Cukor. Oh! No punk feels comfortable being embraced by the masses, especially when they've made a career out of mocking groupthink.

“Kinds of Kindness” is Lanthimos hastily freeing himself from expectations. She has discarded the period ball gowns and extravagant cinematography for a triptych of modern sketches about the horrors of longing for approval. Shot in drab corners of Louisiana, these three misanthropic stories about a micromanaging life coach, a suspicious husband, and a rule-bound sex cult are shaped by a group of talents who take turns abusing each other. Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Stone take center stage; Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Margaret Qualley reinforce the wings.

These mild, repetitive parables are being hailed as a nasty return to form, which is a polite way of saying that Lanthimos and his co-writer Efthymis Filippou have said it all here before: love is control, acceptance is conditional, and autonomy is illusory. . “Dogtooth” and “The Lobster,” Lanthimos’ groundbreaking marvels, covered the same ground and were creepier, funnier, and faster. “Kinds of Kindness” lasts almost three hours and reveals nothing other than our eagerness to give him the benefit of the doubt. We're here for the sick emotions. Instead, what we're served is more like dirty limericks delivered at an excruciating pace by a bore with bad breath.

Each segment is named after a supporting character (played by Yorgos Stefanakos) whose role in the stories becomes increasingly tenuous. In the final short, the connection between the title – “RMF eats a sandwich” – and the plot is so arbitrary that Stefanakos's snack takes place during the end credits. That kind of joke fuels the central question of Lanthimos's filmography: Why are we beholden to artificial structures? All of his movies are about people subjected to pretzels. (Only Bella Baxter, “Poors,” is freed because her brain hasn't learned to adapt.) What Lanthimos really asks is why aren't we suspicious of people who make up the rules? He is training the audience to spot hypocrisy. Here, it's the magnificently emaciated Dafoe ordering Plemons to gain weight, scolding him that “skinny men are the most ridiculous thing ever.”

The worlds of Lanthimos function like a transparent clock exposed directly to the gears. The fascination comes from seeing how each part of the machine pressures the others to behave. His characters speak their minds without apology. The punchy dialogue pairs best with actors who can be read as mood rings, like Colin Farrell with his telltale eyebrows or Stone, who, when he opens his eyes on camera, seems to have the map of the universe in his eyes.

It's no surprise that Lanthimos stays true to his favorites. “Kinds of Kindness” is his second feature film with Dafoe and Alwyn and his third with Stone. Qualley, vibrating with mischief, fits perfectly into the ensemble. During an awkward dinner sequence, there's a wickedly wonderful shot of her panicking as the conversation turns to a home video she doesn't want to watch. She cuts to obscene footage. You feel sorry for her and start laughing.

But “Kindness” builds more scenes around Plemons, and the kind of inscrutable performance he does best simply doesn't fit Yorgosland. Plemons excels when the audience is in suspense so he hums beneath that bushy forehead. Is it harmless or violent? Fool or playing with his prey? His vagueness keeps us on edge, whether as a rebel soldier in “Civil War” or an awkward divorcee in “Game Night.” Here, two of his three characters, both victims and offenders, make decisions that should be painful. Squinting through Plemons's opacity, they come across as dull and inevitable, the punchline to a joke you've already heard. Still, kudos to the hairdressing team for their three vivid hairstyles: a tasteless undercut, an aggressive haircut, and a monkish undercut.

The film is fixated on the body, focusing on weight, measurements and fluids to make it clear that we are all adrenaline-filled bags of meat. The characters always find excuses to visit a hospital (never, of course, a psychiatrist, that would ruin the game). Overall, the style is stark, dingy and institutional, with a color palette of sickly bathwater whites. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan likes to decapitate people right above their noses or spend a scene looking at their feet, getting intimate only in extreme close-ups of flossing or French kissing. The shameless cropping creates some great sight gags, as when Dafoe, in a clever scene in which he stomps on Plemons's every mumbling line, suddenly stands up and we see that this fearsome negotiator is wearing, of all things, a pair of knee-high socks. schoolgirl knee

Jerskin Fendrix's score is equally spartan. Sometimes the piano echoes a note over and over like an alarm; At dramatic peaks, it sounds like a cat is jumping on the keys. The explosion of Eurythmics at the opening seems designed primarily to convince us that we're having fun. The same goes for Stone's solo dance scene, a bit of a non sequitur that feels like an anxious tic inserted to make the movie go viral on TikTok.

I've seen “Kinds of Kindness” twice. Both times I reached the end after spending hours thinking about the limits of my own limits. I had been tested, okay, not for these sketches of a society so cruelly manipulated, but for my commitment to the director who I have considered for years a genius to be seen. Like an insecure lover, Lanthimos seems to keep the audience away from him to see if they will lose all the prizes. I suspect he clearly sees this film's own flaws. If you want to break his heart, consider it a masterpiece.