Safe journey with Emma Stone into the troubled mind of Lanthimos

The Greek’s career Yorgos Lanthimos could not be more representative of the unprecedented meanderings through which auteur cinema moves today. The Athenian went from experimental theater to commercial cinema, co-directing a blockbuster comedy; already alone, Kinetta (2005) and, above all, Canine (2009) brought it to prominence on the international festival circuit; and, less than a decade later, The favourite (2018) and poor creatures (2023) they have incorporated it to the Hollywood authorial aristocracy.

Lanthimos is at that peak of his career where a return to collaboration with his old buddy Efthimis Filippou (co-writer of Canine and The sacrifice of a sacred deergoing by Alps and Lobster) presaged a kind of back to the twisted roots that fueled those first films. And that is the obvious intention of Kinds of Kindness, although the complacency of the plot, the standardization of the staging and a certain domestication in the tone sabotage the purpose.

We are before three independent stories which share most of their stars playing different roles: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe… All of them make exquisite use of the opportunity, especially Plemons carrying the weight of the first two stories and Stone that of the third, although less filtered than other times by Lanthimos’ characteristic direction of actors.

It seems that here the Greek filmmaker has let the performers go to their own devices, thus losing that extra strangeness that was provided by the monotonous diction and mechanical gestures with which he tamed the vices of Hollywood acting naturalness (I think a lot about Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell in The sacrifice of a sacred deer). There is little left of that, leaving the soundtrack (new collaboration with Jerskin Fendrix, less amazing than in Poor creatures) alone on a mission to rarefy the atmosphere.

Unhealthy power relations, persecution mania, identity theft, cannibalism, explicit sex, sects, rape, resurrection of corpses… From the text, the film seems to strive to impress the newcomers to the Lanthimos club with colorful witticisms, unaware that they are being served ideas scraped from the bottom of the barrel, with the flavor of discarded subplots in a Chuck Palahniuk novel and less recklessness than any Tim Robinson sketch.

Each story in this triptych could have been developed in more depth in a feature film, Instead of being served half-cooked, in a capricious and irregular manner. Perhaps a sign of the audiovisual times, where before any solid sediment the immediate stimulus of microdoses is preferred. And on that battlefield, where the fight is against gifs and TikTok clips, there is no better offense than sneak in a wild dance by Emma Stone for free. It needs no context or justification. That is an act of kindness in itself.

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