Review: Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Gen Z hates the salacious. It’s become a truism with Hollywood sex scenes declining 40% since the pre-9/11 days. Blame #MeToo or the psychological ravages of COVID, but cinema has largely lost its edge—less raw and much more palpable as Focus on the Family and the brat behind the coffee counter now share an endgame more similar than one would have imagined. The new puritanism is not so much against sex, but discomfort. Art that reminds us of our human foibles and aspirations just cuts too deep in the era of innocuous streaming. 

Thankfully, nobody seems to have told Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose ribald neo-Victorian hit Poor Things revived the arthouse box office and brought Emma Stone her second Oscar earlier this year. Lanthimos could have rested on all those laurels, helming a prestige cable series based on National Book Award winner or big-budget Nolanlike historical epic. But he’d much rather bring Stone on a return to the terrain of his leaner days when he was merely the abrasive malcontent of sly domestic dystopias like Dogtooth and The Lobster. Yes, Lanthimos is already back six months after his biggest hit, but he’s also out for blood and on a quest to make audiences feel anything but complacency. And that makes Kinds of Kindness the most vital film of an already spectacular summer movie season. 

A triptych of loosely related stories with the same cast set in and around the I-12 corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Kinds of Kindness reunites Stone with Lanthmos vets Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Joe Alywn along with Hong Chau (The Whale, The Menu) and Jesse Plemons, who garnered Best Actor kudos for his performances at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. There’s a budding corporate drone whose boss brings micromanagement to a new level, a cop reeling from the reappearance of his wife after a sailing accident, and two members of a cult looking for an elusive messianic woman. Saying much else would only dilute the impact. 

Within this framework, Lanthimos utilizes Louisiana's distinct landscape for a snarky yet sincere dissection of the limits of control full of sex and violence meant to meaningfully shock us out of our stupor. Is it an allegory of Trumpian authoritarianism? A treatise on COVID overreach? An alarm bell over our willingness to give up autonomy to our Big Tech overlords? Thankfully, Lathismos is too much an artist to boil his work down to such simplistic readings—something all too rare in the current cultural moment.

Kinds of Kindness is now playing in theaters.