Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos is back!
Yorgos Lanthimos is a director who always raises the bar of his cinematographic proposal and, just one year after Poor Things (2024), he makes his debut in the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival with an anthology product which offers a cast of actors in which Jesse Plemons and his muse Emma Stone (protagonist of his three latest works) stand out, playing different characters in the three unconnected episodes co-written by Lanthimos himself. In the first segment the concept of “living to work” is hyperbolized, where Jesse Plemons is completely a slave and victim of his boss’s control mania over his life, down to the most minute details, but a request that is too crazy triggers a series of effects that are still more unhealthy. In the second, again Plemons, almost resigned to the idea of having lost his wife, who disappeared in a scientific research operation, sees her return aesthetically the same, but different in behavior and choices which suggest to him the paranoid doubt that she is not really her . In the third, Emma Stone is a member of a sect led by Willem Dafoe, intent on finding a girl who appeared to her in a dream who could change her importance in the eyes of the spiritual leader.
Each segment refers to the human tendency to obsession, to the risk of confusing oppression with the serenity of having someone to look after us, to the desire to…
