Yorgos Lanthimos has always been an offbeat director, but in recent years his strange lens on life has been elevated to a new level thanks to a partnership with The Great creator Tony McNamara, who crafted the scripts for Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Poor Things. But for his next movie Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos is going back to basics and creating a film unlike anything he’s done before: an anthology of three stories, each weird enough to capture audiences on their own.
Check out the teaser trailer for the film below in anticipation of its June 21, 2024 release, less than a year after the release of Poor Things.
Kinds of Kindness is a reunion for Lanthimos and screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, who wrote his early movies like The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster. It features an all-star cast including Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Defoe, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau in three separate stories. While the teaser trailer doesn’t give us much of an idea of what’s happening, the stark cinematography and unsettling mood make it feel like Lanthimos and Filippou are going back to the well that made their first collaborations so unnerving.
Along with the teaser trailer, we now know what each of these three stories will be about. Searchlight Pictures describes the film as “a triptych fable with segments following a man without choice who tries to take control of his life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing at sea has returned and seems to be a different person; and a woman who is determined to find a specific someone destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”
Hunter Schafer in the teaser for Kinds of Kindness.
The anthology format is something new for Lanthimos, but he’s more than prepared as he has experience directing shorts in between his features. Kinds of Kindness appears to be three segments of shorts that won’t intertwine but will relate to each other thematically to create a singular work of art. It’s not your typical movie, but nothing the duo of Lanthimos and Filippou has created could ever be described as “typical.”
Filippou has always tended to create twisted narratives that often bend the rules of reality itself, and this movie combines three of those plots into one film, stories that would be more at home in an absurdist short story collection or a season of The Twilight Zone than a night at the movies. But with so many high-profile actors — including three returning Poor Things co-stars — even fans of Lanthimos’ slightly more conventional films will find something to love about it.
Kinds of Kindness premieres in theaters June 21, 2024.
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