Yorgos Lanthimos might be one of the strangest filmmakers ever to fall into favor with the Oscars. Hot off the critical and commercial success of 2023’s Poor Things, we have a new Lanthimos joint not even six months later. This is a collaboration between his Greek co-writer from The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, arguably the less “mainstream” Lanthimos movies. This movie is an anthology of three stories with the same actors playing different roles in each story. The problem is that I didn’t engage with any of the stories and found them long, meandering, and poorly paced. That Lanthimos specialty is a cracked-mirror version of the world, mixing the bizarre as if it were mundane, and it’s a trying tonal tightrope for most thespians to excel within that space. There just isn’t enough here, and each new story feels like starting over rather than fulfilling a conclusion. The prior Lanthimos movies had an interesting premise or turn of events that could sustain a whole movie; Kinds of Kindness doesn’t have stories that can sustain three vignettes. I can take weird, alienating, and challenging Lanthimos, as I’ve been a fan ever since his Dogtooth debut, but this is easily his weakest movie yet. The actors all do credible work having distaff conversations in, what appears like, people’s palatial homes and doctor offices. It’s hard to glean a larger theme, point of view, or even general entertainment value with this dull entry. It feels like Lanthimos and his collaborators had a couple free weekends, the use of some rich friends’ homes, and said, “Well, we’ll make it an anthology because then we don’t have to compose a full movie.” Instead of one disappointing movie, now you get three. Kinds of Kindness is, worst of all, mostly forgettable, and given Lanthimos’ track record, that really is the biggest sin possible.

Nate’s Grade: C