WATCH: Review of “Kinds of Kindness”
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest team-up with Emma Stone is not an easy watch, but it is an engrossing one thanks to Stone and the ensemble around her.
After more than three weeks, I’m back! Did you miss me?
Don’t answer that, please.
Here’s the first of two new reviews this week—thoughts on “Kinds of Kindness”:
Afterthoughts…
Before anyone thinks I’m slighting anyone in terms of the performers I named from “The Favourite” YES I know, Olivia Coleman was right there alongside Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz carrying that film and she went home from the Oscars that year with the well-earned hardware for that performance. I didn’t realize what I’d done until after I’d finished recording.
I had a very long outtake from this video talking up Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe’s performances in “Kinds of Kindness” that I eventually had to edit out for time purposes, but their work deserves mention. Plemons seems to be out to make himself the “go-to guy” for uncomfortable intensity. He gets lots more screen time here than he did in “Civil War” earlier this year but in both roles and work stretching back over the past few years he’s delivered unforgettable work playing deeply unsettling characters. Dafoe, meanwhile, has been a master of that particular niche for years, so to see the two of them together on screen, sharing scenes that combine their talents for making audiences squirm and dread whatever might be coming next is incredible to see.
We’re coming up on 24 hours since I sat down to watch the film. Subtract about 6 hours and change for sleep and this movie is still squatting in a corner of my brain, demanding my attention and my efforts to find thematic ties, emotional parallels, anything to make the trio of “fables” make sense as a whole.
At two hours and 44 minutes, a movie like this is a lot to ask of your everyday movie watcher. But to say you can wait to watch it on a streaming service feels to me like a disservice. Lanthimos’ thoughtful and skilled treatment of this difficult material, and what these actors deliver on screen is worth your time at the cinema because it IS cinema. I just know that not everyone goes to the movies for stuff like this, especially nowadays when far fewer people show up at the multiplexes at all unless they’re seeing a sequel or something else that feels like an event.