Kinds of Kindness

“Kindness,” which displays precious little of its title virtue, is a cornucopia of black humor, dark thrills and assorted murders, couplings and things that make you go eeewww.

...a film about the human condition but not about humans.

Kinds of Kindness, like the other works from Lanthimos and Filippou’s partnership, is spikier, intentionally mannered, and far more challenging. But at least when you’re squirming, you know you’re not bored.

I was riveted always. Yes, it's very long, but it moves.

A wonderfully acted absurdist drama that made me look away at times and laugh out loud at others.

It’s a cinema that is edgy and plays with excesses. Certainly not everybody’s cup of tea but one that can’t be ignored. It is riveting, in fact.

It might be easy to mistake the bleakness as signs of a filmmaker who looks at his characters with ambivalent contempt but even when the world is cruel, the sharpest thing about “Kinds of Kindness” is how Lanthimos finds dignity in each action.

As with all his American movies, Kinds of Kindness is both unremittingly cruel and unstintingly self-satisfied.

The characters are all deluded and continuously pushed around, under external control of various kinds and in love with that control. They want to be enslaved and abused, they long or even beg for it. It is the only source of genuine pleasure for them.

Altogether exhilarating and horrifying—a totally Lanthimos experience.