Against, by Eulàlia Iglesias
The reunion of Yorgos Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou, the screenwriter of his first films, seemed to anticipate a return to those darker, uncomfortable and semantically dislocated territories where the Greek traveled before hits like ‘The Favorite’ and ‘Poor Creatures’. But this promise ends up being revealed in the most frustrating way. ‘Kinds of Kindness’ brings together three stories that aim to approach the field of the sinister, the disturbing, from three different scenarios around an employee whose life is designed by his boss, a ‘revenant’ who we do not know if she is who she says she is, and a sect that aspires to well-being through the trivialization of evil.
Far from returning to his roots, Lanthimos seems to settle for a short-range compendium of his own commonplaces, perhaps intended for that new audience that is unaware of his origins, and served from the coordinates of a certain prestige fiction that is supposedly transgressive and includes a luxury cast. The Greek wraps in an aesthetic of exquisite coldness minimal, predictable and harmless doses of black humor, weird sex, cruel narrative, gratuitous deaths, amputations and meta stories a supposedly explosive cocktail that astonishes by its inability not only to annoy, but even to generate the slightest entertainment.
In favor, by Sergi Sánchez
A few months ago, with ‘Poor Creatures’, It seemed that Yorgos Lanthimos was willing to sell his soul as an alchemist of cruelty in exchange for an Oscar, or in other words, in exchange for joining the exclusive club of authors applauded by the mainstream. It is admirable that, meanwhile, he was concocting a film made precisely to get him expelled from that club, or any other club, to the extent that it means a return to his origins in widescreen format (almost three hours), a hostile compendium of that tragicomedy of the sorrows of existence that films like ‘Caninoo Alps’ turned into their style book.
For those who accuse Lanthimos of being a soulless filmmaker, absorbed in his boudoir sadism, ‘Kinds of Kindness’ demonstrates that the main interest of his work is to embrace us as vulnerable beings, capable of doing anything to be loved. In this cornered triptych bathed in vitriol, an exemplary structuralist revision of the film of ‘sketches’ in which each episode resonates and grates with the next in ways as coherent as they are astonishing and the Greek filmmaker once again reveals himself as a magnificent director of actors (Plemons, the king), Love is a prison from which no one wants (or can) escape.
Data sheet
Address: George Lanthimos Distribution: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer Country: Ireland, United Kingdom, United States Year: 2024 Release date: 6-28-2024 Gender: Drama Script: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou Duration: 164 min.
Synopsis: Fable that tells three stories: that of a trapped man who tries to take control of his own life; that of a policeman terrified because his wife, who had disappeared at sea, has returned and looks like a different person, and that of a woman determined to find someone with a special gift, destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
Eulàlia Iglesias Huix is a journalist and critic specialising in film and audiovisuals. Nothing in the cinematic field is foreign to her, although her specialities and interests include auteur cinema, new trends in contemporary cinema, classic Hollywood cinema, woman’s film and other forms of women’s films, new television fiction and music videos.
PhD in the Anthropology and Communication program from the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona), she teaches the subjects of Audiovisual History, and Theory and Analysis of Film and Television within the Audiovisual Communication degree there. A member of the editorial board of Caimán-Cuadernos de cine, she regularly collaborates in the newspaper Ara, Rockdelux, Sensacine and Entreacte, among other publications.
He worked on the editorial staff of Fotogramas from 2003 to 2005, and rejoined the magazine’s staff in 2018. He has also published chapters in collective books on filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Muriel Box, Dorothy Arzner, Jacques Becker, M. Night Shyamalan, Bong Joon-ho, Joseph Losey, Francis Ford Coppola, Max Ophüls, Paul Schrader, Barber Schroeder, Hong Sang-soo, Claude Chabrol, Georges Franju and Larry Clark, among others. He is a member of the Catalan Association of Film Criticism and Writing (ACCEC) and Fipresci of Catalonia, and was a member of its board of directors from 2014 to 2017. A member of the programming committee of Seminci, the Valladolid International Film Week, and of D’A – Barcelona International Author Film Festival, he regularly attends festivals such as Sitges, Locarno and Cannes, with which he has one of his longest-lasting love-hate relationships. He has also been a jury member at the prestigious San Sebastian Film Festival.
He writes and teaches about film as if there were no tomorrow. He saw Carrie at age six and is still applauding the prom scene, although in his later years he prefers to inhabit the somnambulant, charitable states of Apichatpong’s cinema. He has the ability to write books by typing with just one finger.
