Kinds of Kindness

By Joanna Langfield

It takes a lot to surprise me, but gotta hand it to Yorgos Lanthimos. Maybe I didn’t always like what I was seeing happen in this trifecta of nastiness, but I surely do appreciate his masterful unpredictability.

A game company of players performs three seemingly unrelated stories. The plots are fresh spins on some pretty classic horror tales, the kindness mentioned in the title hard to find. There’s a manipulative boss, a wife who returns from a tragic accident, sect members looking for a true healer. And that’s just the start. Where Lanthimos and screenwriter Efthymis Filippou go with it all is wild, bizarre and certainly not for everyone. But, as often as I turned away, both physically and metaphorically, I also laughed. Sometimes out loud. Even the one joke I did foresee coming was performed so well, I still got a kick out of it.

And yes, this movie would never work were it also not for the dedication of the actors. Terrific, lithe work from Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe surrounds the two biggest stars, Lanthimos regular Emma Stone and the happily ubiquitous Jesse Plemons. Stone, who won the Oscar for Poor Things,  her recent collaboration with the director, clearly feels safe enough with him to stretch into all kinds of new, occasionally even grounded directions. But it’s Plemons, an actor who is consistently compelling enough to steal just about every scene he’s in, who wows here. While we meet each of his leading characters in a compassionate light, he’s some poor guy, in over his head, where he goes and how Plemons allows it to happen is quite the feat.

Lanthimos asks a lot of his audience, in temperament and sitting time. This one runs almost three hours. But I was never bored.