Kinds of Kindness: Review of the new Cannes film with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons

MOVIE REVIEWS

May 17, 2024 at 8:08 p.m

After “Poor Things,” director Yorgos Lanthimos is back. This time in Cannes and again with a star cast. We reveal how good the new film with Emma Stone is!

With “Poor Things” Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and director Yorgos Lanthimos have already proven that they can work well together. They are presenting their next film in Cannes this year. Can “Kinds of Kindness” be equally convincing?

We saw the film on location and have to say that unfortunately it cannot live up to the level of the director’s previous films, including “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Favourite”. We’ll tell you what that could be!

Kinds of Kindness … kinda long: The problem lies in the running time of the respective short films

“Kinds of Kindness” has a running time of 165 minutes and consists of three short films that are thematically similar but are not related in terms of content. However, these are not really short. At 165 minutes, each “short film” is on average 55 minutes long and therefore just a bit too long.

Already with the first short film, slight signs of fatigue appear and it is not helpful that all three short films have to struggle with short lengths. This could be forgiven for a feature-length film because the overall dramaturgy could compensate for this, but unfortunately this is not the case with three short films that develop slight lengths independently of each other.

The fact that Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Margaret Qualley (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) and Willem Dafoe shine in their different roles every time makes it clear. Jesse Plemons in particular is incredibly versatile with his fake beards and makeup as well as his body language. It would be a bit impertinent to say he plays the best, but he has the most varied and probably most interesting roles.

Emma Stone is brilliant as always, but this time she doesn’t get to show quite as diverse a range of her acting talent as she did in “Poor Things.” The same applies to Willem Dafoe, who surprisingly plays a “normal”, middle-class person without megalomania or other typical Dafoe attitudes in the middle segment of the anthology film. This was refreshingly unexpected!

The theme of…kindness?

“Kinds of Kindness” can be translated as “kinds of kindness.” However, it’s not really about kindness, but rather about how far people are willing to go to be loved by others. Lanthimos also ventures into the realms of peer pressure and the topic of feeling like you belong.

With cult-like groups and wild rituals, requirements and standards in order to belong to them, Lanthimos goes wild on the screen and lets us have fun with these absurd and sometimes grotesque moments. Stylistically, “Kinds of Kindness” is more reminiscent of Lanthimos’ earlier works and less of “The Favorite” or “Poor Things”.

There are fewer distorted camera angles, no fisheye effects and the color scheme is not quite as striking. The short films themselves differ little to not at all stylistically. The fact that Lanthimos slows down again after the highly stylized “Poor Things” is not a negative thing.

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