Sweet Dreams blares over the opening credits and at the press screening at the Cannes Film Festival the audience erupts in applause as if Annie Lennox herself were standing in front of them. To put it with a certain poetry: The audience for the new Emma Stone film was really pumped.
With half the ensemble of his Oscar hit Poor Things and some pretty sick ideas, Yorgos Lanthimos has made his new film Kinds of Kindness. It stars Emma Stone three different roles in three different episodes, which add up to almost three hours. But you’re not looking at a classic Emma Stone vehicle, and by classic I also mean something like her last film, in which she was transplanted with a baby brain.
Kinds of Kindness consists of three films starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons
Back to Kinds of Kindness, in which Yorgos Lanthimos co-wrote the screenplay with Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth) for the first time since the cinematic freezer The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The difference to his previous two Stone films, Poor Things or The Favorite, is immediately noticeable. The historical settings give way to the present, in which the sun shines and it is still cold. And actually Kinds of Kindness is not just an Emma Stone film, but at least as much a Jesse Plemons vehicle, of which there should clearly be more.
Three episodes, mini-features in themselves, so to speak, follow each other.
Check out the trailer for Kinds of Kindness:
Kinds of Kindness – Teaser Trailer (German) HD
In the first, Plemons (Killers of the Flower Moon) plays a man who lets his boss (Willem Dafoe) control his entire life: from the woman (Hong Chau) he lives with to the number of Anna Karenina pages , which he reads every day. When he wants to seize decision-making power, he learns the pitfalls of freedom.
Episode 2 shows Plemons as a police officer who confronts his long-lost wife (Emma Stone). But he has a dark suspicion: What if he’s dealing with a doppelganger? Finally, in the final segment, Plemons and Stone portray a couple who are looking for a chosen one for a religious cult.
Laughter and shocks alternate diligently
With each episode, Kinds of Kindness takes on darker shades, so that at some point the humorous facets can only be described as deep black and fart-dry. This is not a diss. Kinds of Kindness is fabricated some of the funniest punchlines, which I have been able to giggle at so far this cinema year. The ruthlessness with which Lanthimos throws his sometimes repulsive, sometimes absurd ideas at us makes even the weaker gags explode. I could write a thousand words about Willem Dafoe wearing pants, briefs, or nothing at all in this film, but I’d rather not. Watching it is much more enjoyable than writing about it.
Disney
Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness
Lanthimos and Filippou dive into various human depths in search of goodness, garnished with one or two severed body parts. The playful tone with which sawn-open rib cages were passed through in Poor Things is missing. We are back with a Lanthimos, whose characters come to mind in worse moments Subject in a sadistic experiment same. At moments like this, the hall in Cannes quickly became quite quiet.
In its almost three hours, Kinds of Kindness packs a few laughs and even more shocks, but ultimately comes across as arbitrary, bloated, and neither funny nor shocking enough for its running time. At some point I had the feeling that I was trapped in a bizarre version of TikTok, where you swipe from one Lanthimos idea to the next. The only salvation is to chop off your own thumb. Which, by the way, a character in Kinds of Kindness does. And then the piece of finger is fried. Sweet Dreams …