Coming off the commercial and critical success of Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos pivoted sharply with Kinds of Kindness. Where Poor Things was colorful, exuberant, and broadly accessible, this film is cold, precise, and designed to alienate as much as it engages. It’s an anthology of three separate stories, each featuring the same ensemble cast in different roles. The stories are connected thematically rather than narratively, exploring variations on the same ideas about submission, control, and the lengths people go to in order to belong.
The film premiered at Cannes in 2024, where Jesse Plemons won Best Actor, then arrived in theaters to a deeply divided reception. Audiences expecting another Poor Things got something closer to The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The conversation around the film has been less about whether it’s good and more about what Lanthimos is trying to do with it, and whether the effort is justified.
Three Stories, One Obsession
The performances are the film’s most reliable pleasure. Emma Stone plays three wildly different women across the anthology, and each one showcases a different dimension of her range. The first story casts her as a peripheral figure, the second makes her the emotional center, and the third puts her in the most physically demanding role. Her work in the second chapter, where she plays a woman whose husband returns from a disappearance subtly changed, is the most memorable, carrying layers of paranoia and grief without a single moment of overplaying.
Jesse Plemons matches her across all three stories. His ability to project quiet menace while maintaining a surface-level normalcy makes him the perfect Lanthimos protagonist. In the first chapter, he plays a man whose entire life is dictated by his employer, from what he eats to when he sleeps. Plemons makes that subjugation feel both absurd and painfully recognizable, tapping into something real about the way power dynamics shape daily life. His Cannes win was deserved.
Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley round out an ensemble that treats the material with total seriousness. Nobody winks at the camera. Nobody signals that they know the film is strange. That collective commitment to the tone is what holds the three stories together, creating a consistent atmosphere even as the characters and settings change.
Individual scenes achieve a kind of controlled devastation that few filmmakers can manage. Lanthimos builds tension through sustained takes, precise framing, and an almost clinical observation of human behavior under pressure. When violence occurs, it’s sudden and flat, stripped of dramatic music or quick editing. When emotion surfaces, it’s equally unadorned. The effect is disorienting in a way that keeps you off-balance throughout.
The thematic throughline connecting the three stories becomes clearer on reflection than it is during viewing. Each story examines a relationship where one person surrenders their autonomy to another, and each explores a different reason why someone might choose to do that. Love, fear, faith, the desire to be seen. Lanthimos isn’t interested in judging these motivations. He’s cataloging them with the detached curiosity of an anthropologist, and that distance is both the film’s signature and its most divisive quality.
The Weight of Nearly Three Hours
The runtime is the elephant in the room. At 164 minutes split across three stories with no narrative connective tissue, the film demands an endurance that not every story earns. The first chapter is the tightest and most immediately engaging, establishing the film’s tone with efficiency. The third chapter builds to a conclusion that rewards patience. The middle chapter, about the returning husband, is the most emotionally complex but also the slowest, and it’s where many audience members mentally check out.
Lanthimos’s refusal to provide context, explanation, or resolution in any of the three stories will frustrate viewers who want narrative clarity. Characters behave in extreme ways without stated motivation. Plots arrive at endings that aren’t really endings. The film doesn’t care whether you understand it on first viewing, and that approach, while valid as an artistic choice, can feel like arrogance rather than ambition when you’re in hour two of a film that won’t meet you halfway.
The shift from Poor Things’ accessibility back to the austere style of The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer disappointed some viewers who were hoping for continued evolution toward broader appeal. Kinds of Kindness feels like a deliberate retreat from populism, a film made to prove that commercial success didn’t soften the director’s edges. That’s admirable in principle but makes for a difficult recommendation in practice.
Some of the shock elements, including graphic sexuality and sudden violence, feel calibrated for maximum discomfort rather than serving the story. Lanthimos has always used provocation as a tool, but in a few scenes here, the provocation feels like the point rather than the vehicle.
The Director’s Cut of Human Behavior
Kinds of Kindness works best understood not as three separate movies but as a single essay told in three movements. Each story strips away a layer of social convention to examine why people submit to authority, cruelty, or faith. The recurring cast creates a strange intimacy across the stories, as if you’re watching the same souls cycle through different configurations of the same fundamental dynamic. Whether that’s brilliant or pretentious depends on your tolerance for art that explains itself through repetition rather than narrative.
Lanthimos is asking something specific: at what point does devotion become self-destruction? Each chapter offers a different answer, and none of them are comforting. The film’s coldness isn’t a flaw. It’s the thesis.
Should You Watch Kinds of Kindness?
If you connected with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dogtooth, or The Lobster, this is Lanthimos operating in that same register with his strongest ensemble cast to date. Art-house fans who enjoy challenging, ambiguous cinema will find substantial material to chew on. Skip it if you found Poor Things to be your entry point to Lanthimos and expected more of the same warmth and humor. Skip it if three hours of deliberately uncomfortable filmmaking without narrative payoff sounds like a bad time. Kinds of Kindness doesn’t want to be liked. Whether that makes it admirable or insufferable is entirely up to you.
The Verdict on Kinds of Kindness
Kinds of Kindness is a film that refuses to compromise, for better and worse. The ensemble performances are exceptional, with Stone and Plemons delivering some of their strongest work. Individual scenes achieve a tonal precision that only a handful of working directors could pull off. But the anthology structure and punishing runtime create a viewing experience that even sympathetic audiences find challenging, and the deliberate opacity will alienate more people than it enlightens. It’s a film to be respected more than enjoyed, debated more than rewatched, and admired from a distance more than embraced. Lanthimos made exactly what he wanted to make. Whether you want to receive it is another question entirely.