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User Reviews for: Kinds of Kindness

JC230
3/10  8 months ago
Maybe I’m just not a Lonthimos person. First segment I was kind of vibing with. It had the most DaFoe, the actor most keyed in to Lonthimos’ energy. And Plemmons was at his best there, because it was like he was being molded and forced into Raymond’s- and by extension Lonthimos’- ideas of how people talk and act. It was almost American Psycho adjacent- high status weirdos knowing they’re apart from normal people and feeling like hollow, empty approximations trying to become a twisted ideal. That worked well enough for me!

The second segment had some intrigue, but dragged too long, dipped into the ‘lying about domestic abuse’ tropes, and while the ending got a bit of a pop from me I still wasn’t satisfied. I liked the gray areas, but here Lonthimos’ style really grated. It worked for Emma Stone as an ambiguous human and ambiguously well intentioned figure, and even with Plemmons’ it feeds into his ambiguity of character. But then everyone talks like that. The chief, the doctor, the best friend. It pulls me out, almost as much as the damn music. I hated it in Stranger Things and I hated here. I don’t know Fendix’s solo work, and I don’t doubt he’s delivering what Lonthimos asked for. But it’s intrusive, jarring, and insistent, never letting the audience decide what to feel or unsettled by but desperately signaling to you ‘hey time to be creeped out or saddened’.

I thought I was being ungenerous, I’ve been rewatching some Clickhole as I tend to do once in a while, and I thought the material and cadence sounded like those. I waved it off. But then Emma does her dog dream speech and I almost lost it in the theater because it could’ve been taken from one of those, with the same earnestness and ridiculousness and I’m sure that’s intentional in part, but this is also supposed to be a key moment for Liz(?). Some measure of sympathy or at least doubt is supposed to be grown in the audience. And I felt nothing.

And I loathed the third segment. I found the sexual assault gratuitous in a narrative that was weak to begin with and ends meaninglessly. And I can dig endings like that, stories like that. I’m sure there’s things to be gleamed here if you dig deeper. But it’s a movie that’s surface is so ugly and pretentious I don’t want to. It’s an ending that makes me go ‘what was the point’ with no satisfaction or urge to find it whatsoever. And I feel like if I did the answers wouldn’t be satisfying. Yeah yeah the limits of human devotion and the dark side of what we consider kindness, even the sexual assault could be from his twisted perspective a kindness. But I don’t care, I don’t feel it. It doesn’t hit. Even the absurdism gets pat. I don’t know, is there one of his movies I’ll like, or is a Lonthimos film just not the kind for me?
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