In the first of the three loosely connected vignettes that make up Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, a meek but devoted businessman crashes his car so he can spend a night at the hospital. This is to appease his boss, a Machiavellian puppeteer who directs every moment of his subordinate’s life, in exchange for a great house, a loving wife and priceless sports memorabilia.
But Robert (Jesse Plemons) doesn’t do everything Raymond (Willem Dafoe) wants just for these rewards. It’s because he’s drawn to Raymond’s authority and has come to crave the dependence and validation that courses through their relationship.
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The following two stories, which give more central roles to cast members Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie, are also perverse looks at the need to be desired and approved, but only this opening chapter centres on emotional manipulation of capitalist hierarchies – that labourers become worthier by supplicating to their superiors and getting their blessing. Lanthimos’s film satirises the idea that the greater wealth and influence someone has, the closer they seem to godliness.
Kinds of Kindness premiered at last month’s Cannes Film Festival, to less fanfare than his triumphant, award-winning Poor Things, but many critics still responded to the Greek Weird Wave director returning to jet-black, cold-hearted satire of a sick society. This Cannes saw the launch of many films confronting the hollow, dangerous reality of pursuing capitalist success through its various late stages.
Ali Abbasi’s uncanny Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice flirts with showing the former president fabricating a soul in order to sell it to the devil; David Cronenberg’s exploration of grief and tech in The Shrouds finds a well of dry humour in the ways apps and AI invade our most personal pains; Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded Megalopolis is an epic and unwieldy narrative experiment of a virtuous intellectual never giving up on civil improvement.