Kinds of Kindness

"This is it. The moment of truth. Isn't it wonderful?"

A well-structured Lanthimian synthesis of three different stories, all connected fundamentally through the veil of existential suffering. The director unrolls a dark game of power and control, where self-sacrifice and sadistic tensions are entangled.

The film contains a handful amount of strong graphic scenes, with some of them being extremely disturbing to the audience. This might seem like an attempt to expose the depths of the human subconscious we all share. We are witnesing a "place" where animalistic instincts defeat logic and emotions.

With the main cast remaining the same in each of the stories the roles of the characters are rotating.

First story

We’re observing a corporate man that desperately needs a “mentor” to take every decision for his life instead of himself, whether it concerns his diet or the need to have offspring. The main character is sacrificing himself and his freedom in order to earn the acceptance of others.

Individuality is smashed to its core and utterly collapses.

Second story

This part refers to a police officer who is concerned about the behaviour of his wife, who just returned home from a shipwreck incident. He believes that she isn’t the one she was and that see seems a different person.

The sense of oneself starts to reconstruct.

Third story

The third story is about a woman…for whom I don’t know anything about because I left the cinema due to the existensial crisis Lanthimos and his cast caused me but also due to the extensive graphic scenes.

Overall

Painfully cruel and funny at the same time, the movie sets the audience in between two extremely important and fundamental opponents.

We are a small yellow tennis ball in a match with no referees, between acceptance and freedom. Sometimes we’re moving towards the need to be loved and other times towards the need to love.

Furthermore as Eurythmics, whom their song used for the soundrack, say...

"Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get use by you

Sweet dreams are made of this…

Everybody’s looking for something"

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