KINDS OF KINDNESS Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos are the most sensational actor-director partnership since Luis Buñuel met Catherine Deneuve. She has brought warmth, screwball humour and mainstream appeal to his often-chilly arthouse absurdism. Meanwhile, he has encouraged her into erotic and philosophical realms unusual for an all-singing, all-dancing, all-American actor who chose to name herself after Baby Spice.
On the face of it, Kinds Of Kindness looks like a backwards step in their creative pas de deux. It reunites Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou, the writer responsible for the savage surrealism of his early, funny-peculiar stuff: Dogtooth (isolation and parental abuse), Alps (acting and death), The Lobster (love and animals) and Killing Of A Sacred Deer (surgery and sacrifice). Across three distinct stories, it enacts a kind of greatest hits thematic remix of their earlier films and is likely to bemuse and appal many of those who fell for ’ pastel steampunk picaresque. The sickos among us, who have delighted in Lanthimos’ spectacular ascent, will find much to relish, however.
