“The bar for what constituted success was not very high.” That’s Sam Seder of The Majority Report talking about Joe Biden’s debate performance last Thursday. I’m sure a lot of film fans would say the same of Ti West, the American horror director currently on a roll and one week away from releasing Maxxxine, the finale in his Mia Goth trilogy. None of his stuff does it for me: The House of the Devil is yet another sleepwalk through a haunted house, and a tremendous waste of living legends Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov; X was a lame beginning to a trilogy that only got exciting with 2022’s Pearl, carried entirely by Goth; as for Maxxxine, we’ll see. I don’t buy the early reviews and comparisons to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—besides, the odds of West even approaching Tarantino’s masterpiece are about as good as Joe Biden stepping down to teach elocution.
Expectations are down across the board. Yorgos Lanthimos? What have you done for me lately? Five years in between The Favourite and Poor Things: the former was very good, the latter disappointing; but remember that The Favourite was his third film in as many years, and with Bugonia shooting now in London and already scheduled for release on November 7, 2025, Lanthimos is once again here to stay (for now). Who knows if he’ll ever actually adapt Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation—I hope not, and I hope no one ever makes it because I don’t want to see that moronic ending filmed.
Kinds of Kindness is a cool move if not a good movie: released just six months after Oscar-winning Poor Things, 20 minutes longer, stilted and brutal in a way his films haven’t been since The Killing of a Sacred Deer, seven years but only two films ago. Regulars like Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe return alongside Lanthimos muse Emma Stone; Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Joe Alwyn round out the cast. Kinds of Kindness is three separate stories set in the present, with the first two serving as a showcase for Cannes Best Actor winner Plemons, and the last for Stone. Anamorphic widescreen, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” announcing the film, and it all deflates from there.
It’s a fine movie to see on a summer night like I did with a theater full of people, but one I won’t ever watch again. Nothing dire or crucially wrong with it, but what’s there? This guy isn’t Kubrick. I don’t like Lars von Trier that much, but he’s another frequent Lanthimos comparison, and his films are full of the life and pain and longing and emotion that Lanthimos just doesn’t have. Maybe he’s not interested in emotions or real life—a mediocre mad scientist vivisecting flies, and for what? All this movie needed to work was to be funny. Lanthimos has nothing to say about the world or the people in it. His filmmaking isn’t compelling or impressive enough to excuse or cover up his deficits. At its best, Kinds of Kindness is clever, with a few laughs (“So where are we gonna fuck, on the table?”)—but not many, and not nearly enough to get anyone excited or even offended.
I heard Kinds of Kindness described as “a poke in the eye,” but all I saw was an inert black comedy far below The Curse, another recent Emma Stone project I kept thinking about during the movie. Nathan Fielder should have the film career that Lanthimos has; after he directs his first film this year, maybe he will.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith