Lanthimos is back, baby! Todo bien con Poor Things, but it didn’t feel like pure Lanthimos, a smart director who knows how to play the long game and not get pigeonholed as one of those insufferably European arty types. All the same, this blog feels more affinity with weirdo Lanthimos, and in Kinds of Kindness, he’s back with a vengeance. We get mind control, reincarnation, and self-mutilation, among other choice cuts in this anthology piece, which is scripted with co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. There’s more than enough surreal meat on these bones. Stone and Plemmons deliver in spades, giving the more arcane philosophical elements of the film a consistently plausible human root. The script delivers, not least Stone’s monologue when she talks about dog-world, dialogue which is echoed in some of the smart cut-aways, not to mention Stone’s abuse of a stray dog in the film’s third chapter. The animal elements lend the film a Rilkean dimension: humans are shown to be naive, befuddled, cruel, desperate, in contrast to the more straightforward world of the animals. The ensemble use of the same cast across the three stories adds another playful dimension, reminiscent of Buñuel. What is the film actually about and how might this tie in with its cryptic title? I guess it’s about what it means to be human in this day and age, the desperate need to belong to a tribe in a world where fools are lauded as kings or queens.
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