Kinds of Kindness - Attempt in the Triptych
Thoughts On: Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Three shorts depicting individuals violently trying to retain grip on themselves and their lives.
I've never been a big fan of a triptych film; or a film made of semi or unrelated chapters or stories. The problem one can never escape with them concerns comparison; often constructed to manifest overtonal montage or narrative counterpoint, triptych films promote the judgment of taste and the question of - what part did you like best. Despite being a whole of three parts, Kinds of Kindness suffers from a disjointedness between its chapters that sets the separate narratives in divergence to one another as opposed to layering them. Three fascinating shorts with loose thematic bonds, but no strong through-strand, Kinds of Kindness lacks punctum as a result of its complexity and in such is about too many things to be felt coherent at points. Directing a body-horror in parts, Lanthimos does best in manifesting a sensory experience of misery and subjugation. Very much so a vision of the struggle of wills, his newest film returns - in tone and dramatic style - to his earlier works such as Alps, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth by mitigating sensationalism in the world of the narrative and emphasising behavioural abnormality in the drama. More grounded and subtle in its strangeness, Kinds of Kindness is (alongside the mentioned other Lanthimos films) then tonally distinct from Poor Things and The Favourite due to its obtuse bluntness, meaningless violence and depersonalisation of individuals - therefore its reduction of characters to action as opposed to souls caught in narrative dramaturgy as is seen in Lanthimos' more recent character studies. I find Lanthimos most interesting when he employs this darker tone and Bressonian approach, one that distinguishes characters as absurd actors as opposed to insane people. And it is of course no surprise that we have a return to this and the feel of Lanthimos' older narratives as Kinds of Kindness sees him return to working with Efthymis Filippou again - very cool to see. Alas, it is a pain to say but it certainly feels worth noting, I would have loved to have seen these shorts separated and expanded into their own narratives or otherwise conjoined to be one straight cohesive whole instead of a contrapuntal triptych producing sensory punctum without much pneuma. Reminiscent of Lanthimos' shorts and music videos, Kinds of Kindness is a visually and sensorily sensational experience in parts; it doesn't quite manage to sit quite deep and grab a hold however due to a slight disjointedness and brevity. Nonetheless a fascinating piece of work - one that could undoubtedly be picked apart and many gems found within - Kinds of Kindness is a slick addition to Lanthimos' developing library; eager as ever to see more from him.
