Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos is back after a short break with his film Kinds of Kindness!The film, which released its first trailer shortly after the Oscar success of Poor Things, the most talked about film of 2023, stars Oscar winner Emma Stone and Oscar nominees Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe. With Margaret Qualley, Oscar nominee Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer, the film features three different stories that deal with humanitarian issues in a dystopian language. The relationship between a boss who manipulates the lives of his employees and gives them a list of what kind of person they will become, a paranoid wife who thinks that her husband who returns after being missing for a long time is not the same person, and a cult member whose aim is to find someone with superpowers.
Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou’s stories are dominated by the God allegory. Belonging, rules, corruptible people, cult nonsense, the recent increase in self-development scams… The deification of the needs of individuals for each other underlines the search for a God, a saviour in every story.
Ayrton Senna’s famous helmet, John McEnroe’s broken tennis racket… Everything is possible, only if you follow the rules. Our boss, who knows no limits in making his employees happy with gifts, starts the film with a system that designs the accidents and deaths of people and tells them how they should live by setting rules; and in each story, our different characters who need to dominate the people around them with a divine mission, and our characters who are unrealistically uncomfortable yet ruthlessly in search of goodness, leave behind the moments where we question our perception of faith and our sense of pity.
Kinds of Kindness, a three-part anthology, consists of three independent stories that deal with the concepts of control, power and kindness, played by the same cast. In Kinds of Kindness, which opens with Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”, the music points to a very basic narrative language and the film reveals its main issue from the very beginning: ‘’Everybody is looking for something.Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.’ In every part of the film, we follow the stories of characters who control and exploit others or are exploited by them. A man whose whole life, even his death, is controlled second by second by his boss, another man who does not believe that his wife is his real wife and demands unimaginable sacrifices from her, a woman who has been brainwashed by a cult and risks everything to fulfil the prophecy… The only intersection of these three worlds is the ordinary expressions behind the big promises. The characters, who look and act very ‘civilised’ on the outside, are always under the rule of a tit-for-tat law in this direct world Lanthimos has constructed. Nothing represents anything else in this world; everything means only itself. There is no euphemism, no indirection, therefore no ‘kindness’. The contrast created by the characters’ reaction or lack of reaction to this situation sometimes leads to black humour and sometimes to brutality.
We are in search of what kind of playlist Lanthimos would have left us with if Emma Stone’s dance at the end of the film had continued for a little while longer. We leave the concepts of compassion, control and sacrifice aside and let ourselves to the rhythm of the music. Just like Lanthimos, we can be in a place where we express ourselves through song lyrics.