Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the sour, deadpan register of his early Greek work, reuniting with co-writer Efthimis Filippou for a triptych of fables in which the same actors cycle through fresh miseries in each segment. Jesse Plemons anchors all three, Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe drift through as variations on control and submission, and a genuinely international ensemble (Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer) occupies the margins. That diversity is simply there, unremarked and unexamined. The film has no interest in what it might mean. It is interested in what people will do when someone else holds the leash.

The first story gives us Robert, whose boss and lover Raymond owns his house, his car, and his bedroom schedule; the same-sex dynamic is explicit and entirely unremarkable to the film, which treats it as one more lever of domination. The third story orbits a sex cult and its rituals of sweat and navel-licking. Queerness here is texture, not argument. Meanwhile the film inflicts graphic cruelty on its women (severed thumbs, carved livers, a drugging and a rape) with no framing that could be called a critique, and a character's antipsychotic prescription is played for grotesque comedy instead of advocacy. There is no climate anxiety, no racial consciousness, no historical revision. The body count is the point, not the bodies.

A possible reading of Raymond as capital itself exists, a boss who provisions your life and then charges you for it. The film gestures at that idea and then shrugs. It is not a sermon. Lanthimos has no interest in instructing anyone, and the absence of moral instruction is both the picture's integrity and the reason it leaves so little behind. A less confident director would have told us what to feel. This one simply shows us the dogs, and lets us sort it out.