"Kinds of Kindness": Care Propagates Cruelty

An abrupt return to form, Yorgos Lanthimos creates a recognizable world with alien behaviors

Following the critical and commercial success of last year’s Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness is an abrupt return to form, reverting to the simplicity of his original unorthodoxy. Lanthimos has always played with the human form, but while Poor Things and The Favourite did so within a lavish tableau, Kinds of Kindness reduces itself to the austerity of sterile modern structures. This return to simplicity elevates Lanthimos’s signature meanness, rendering his examination of the corrosion of the body all the more palpable.

Kinds of Kindness is structured as a triptych, with each narrative exploring the extent to which love is control — how our dedication to others guides us towards self-degradation. With a recurring cast appearing in different roles, the film allows for an array of familiar Lanthimos collaborators to flex their chops in a variety of complementary characters. The brevity of each story is key to their potency, as the shortened runtime forces the narrative to constrain itself, while the audience must accept that they will be completely alienated and receive no thorough explanation or satisfaction. 

Without the comfort of a feature runtime, Lanthimos warps reality without allowing time for deliberation. Inside of the film’s stripped down milieu, his imagination of the world strikes a balance that blends the familiar and the aberrated — recognizable emotions motivate entirely alien behaviors. It’s the world as we know it, governed by absurdist laws. 

Though the imagery of Kinds of Kindness is unlike Lanthimos’s recent ventures, his techniques stay fairly constant. His liberal use of the wide angle is familiarly claustrophobic — the expanse of the angle pinches the corners of the frame, and as the film grows increasingly unsettling, your eyes instinctively dart to the edges of the screen, only to see them shrinking away and folding into each other as the subject occupies the center. 

In contrast to the wide angle, the camera often frames bodies at intensely close range, forcibly omitting faces and heads, fracturing the form into individual parts and framing them through a utilitarian lens. Rather than exploring the limits of the body for social aim, as in Lanthimos’s recent films, Kinds of Kindness takes a carnal, functional approach to the destruction of the form. In this film, bodies are captured and treated as meat, physical vessels for the perversions of desire. 

What makes Kinds of Kindness particularly propulsive (when contrasted to Lanthimos’s previous work, with the exception of The Favourite) is its focus not only the destructive desire for admiration, but what manifests after that destruction. Does the abasement allow for love to develop in a richer, truer form? Does it result in a hostile emptiness, or a gateway for further cruelty to oneself and others? 

As the film’s animalistic hostility increases with each narrative, the care that motivates such cruelty becomes increasingly apparent. Displeasure pushed to its limits makes way for care coming from a much more thoughtful place, and though it may manifest itself in vile actions, the intentions are pure albeit blinding. Kinds of Kindness reveals itself as not only Lanthimos’s most reactive, but his most loving — his signature meanness comes from a deep concern for the human form, artistic and physical, and a genuine appreciation for those who care enough in return to withstand it. 

OVERALL RATING: 9/10

Kinds of Kindness was released on June 21, 2024, and is currently streaming on Hulu.