Rent Kinds of Kindness (2024)

A Difficult Watch - Kinds of Kindness review by KB

I didn't enjoy it .Very long ,not at all uplifting & unsettling in places & i didn't really know what was going on for most of it.I thought the directors' last film , with Emma Stone , was reasonable but i won't get any more films of his out after this .

Utterly Lacking in Enjoyment - Kinds of Kindness review by GS

This film is overlong and extremely mis directored.

I certainly wasted a rental credit hire this movie, you have to ask yourself, who was talked into financing this movie.

A long, boring, monotonous & dull film, not a patch on Dogtooth - Kinds of Kindness review by Timmy B

Yorgos Lanthimos genuinely is a Marmite director & writer. In one respect, it is an admirable trait, considering how when most people in the entertainment industry get the first whiffs of success, they change both themselves and their style. This is something Lanthimos could never be accused of, consistently creating weird, deeply idiosyncratic & often highly sexualised works, with the rare benefit of being able to cast A-List actors in these roles.

But the risk of Lanthimos's style is when a story doesn't work or keep your attention, it just becomes an exercise in watching the screen and trying to keep following what is happening, whilst getting more & more bored. And this is how I felt watching Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of stories with tangentially connected events.

I just sat watching a collection of characters saying stilted & off-paced dialogue, acting out a story which progressed at a snails pace, made no sense and slowly I became less interested in following. Jesse Plemons plays a man whose life is controlled by a creepy & weird older man (Defoe,) who makes extreme demands of him then gifts random rewards when he completes the tasks. Whilst looking for logic in a Lanthimos film is as pointless as trying to kick water uphill, it simply wasn't interesting.

The following story, concerning a man (Plemons) whose wife has gone missing at sea, follows a similar pattern. She returns but he believes that she is not his real wife, but someone pretending to be her. Again, there is a lot of stilted & meandering dialogue, alongside sudden and shocking bursts of violence & sex, but none of it is funny or engaging, just boring.

I kept going with it for probably an hour 40 before giving up. It is one of the most pointless films I have watched recently, which took a chunk of my life I will never get back. And, whilst at this point, Lanthimos fans would probably say something along the lines of "But that's his style, you just don't get it," I loved Dogtooth. It's not Lanthimos's style I hated here, it's the rubbish film he made...