Kinds of Kindness
If I was getting graded for it, I'd describe Kinds of Kindness as an absurdist anthology movie about power structures that prey on people's need for love and approval, as depicted across three separate short movies:
1) About a man whose whole life and routine - everything from what time he goes to bed and what he has for breakfast to whom he marries and whether he's allowed to have children - is puppeted by his employer, up until he refuses to follow through with commiting vehicular homicide,
2) About a man whose wife was lost at sea and when she's miraculously returned he becomes convinced that's not really her, so he starts ordering her acts of self-mutilation to prove a point,
3) About a woman who's been alienated from her husband and daughter by a cult who orders its members to have sex with its leaders and only drink from water blessed by their tears, while looking for a prophesied messiah who can raise the dead,
So you have all these perverse codependent dynamics between employers and employees, husbands and wives, leaders and followers, where one person always asks everything of another, withholding affection and approval while bribing them with "love". Making it all the more icky is the fact that it's the same 5 or 6 actors playing different characters in every story, so father and daughter in one story are lovers in another, husband and wife can be strangers, etc.
If I had to sell it to boomers I'd mention Twilight Zone and a throwaway of the above.
Reading comprehension aside... no, I didn't like the movie. Not because I found out about Yorgos Lanthimos with his steampunk remake of Eat Pray Love and came back for seconds, or because I liked The Lobster or Sacred Deer better. I was just kinda disgusted by the whole thing, and the stop-and-start structure of an anthology doesn't benefit something so dark and unrewarding. And I say that as someone who enjoyed Longlegs.
If I was getting graded for it, I'd describe Kinds of Kindness as an absurdist anthology movie about power structures that prey on people's need for love and approval, as depicted across three separate short movies:
1) About a man whose whole life and routine - everything from what time he goes to bed and what he has for breakfast to whom he marries and whether he's allowed to have children - is puppeted by his employer, up until he refuses to follow through with commiting vehicular homicide,
2) About a man whose wife was lost at sea and when she's miraculously returned he becomes convinced that's not really her, so he starts ordering her acts of self-mutilation to prove a point,
3) About a woman who's been alienated from her husband and daughter by a cult who orders its members to have sex with its leaders and only drink from water blessed by their tears, while looking for a prophesied messiah who can raise the dead,
So you have all these perverse codependent dynamics between employers and employees, husbands and wives, leaders and followers, where one person always asks everything of another, withholding affection and approval while bribing them with "love". Making it all the more icky is the fact that it's the same 5 or 6 actors playing different characters in every story, so father and daughter in one story are lovers in another, husband and wife can be strangers, etc.
If I had to sell it to boomers I'd mention Twilight Zone and a throwaway of the above.
Reading comprehension aside... no, I didn't like the movie. Not because I found out about Yorgos Lanthimos with his steampunk remake of Eat Pray Love and came back for seconds, or because I liked The Lobster or Sacred Deer better. I was just kinda disgusted by the whole thing, and the stop-and-start structure of an anthology doesn't benefit something so dark and unrewarding. And I say that as someone who enjoyed Longlegs.
