Yorgos Lanthimos: Kinds of Kindness

The critical and public success of Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest effort, evidently rewards what is perhaps the primary quality of his cinema: a coherence of approach, a stylistic signature, a thematic recurrence that is difficult to match. At the level of opinion, more or less sophisticated or common, clemency therefore seems to prevail over the inevitable downside of the coin. That is, on the fact that, without going so far as to say that having seen one of his films you have seen them all, each of them seems to be a more or less virtuous or sober variation of a plot woven originally and once and for all.

“Kinds of Kindness”, 2024, 164 min. Regia di Yorgos Lanthimos, sceneggiatura di Efthymis Filippou e Yorgos Lanthimos, casa di produzione: Element Pictures, Film4, TSG Entertainment, Searchlight Pictures, distribuzione in italiano: Searchlight Pictures, fotografia: Robbie Ryan, montaggio: Yorgos Mavropsaridis, musiche: Jerskin Fendrix, ph courtesy Searchlight Pictures

Moreover, it is well known that a similar phenomenon is recurrent among cinematographic products, especially those from the American West Coast. How can you criticize the fact that, once the success of a genre has been discovered, it is replicated indefinitely? Isn’t the important thing that the show goes on? And that somewhere there is something to gain from it? A long time ago, wasn’t there the golden moment of the so-called “psychological westerns” about the ethics of the cowboy? Now Yorgos Lanthimos can be considered, if not the inventor, then one of the most accredited promoters of a similarly “new” genre. Let’s say the “psychological horror” genre like this: a horror that doesn’t make you close your eyes but rather the pit of your stomach, that doesn’t make your skin shiver but causes nausea, that doesn’t induce terrifying insomnia, but mental numbness, that doesn’t disturb the senses, but it sends them into a state of confusion.

Without anticipating its content and ruining the surprise of the potential viewer, the conclusion of the second episode of Kinds of Kindness is exemplary of what has just been said. Witnessing it, after having been teased by some gruesome macabre image, we find ourselves faced with an ending that is as equivocal as it is disorienting: the enigma that has been hovering since the opening of the story is neither solved nor evaded, but actually doubled. Madness and reality therefore appear on equal merit, with equal credibility. Nor is each spectator left his own truth, but only the dizzying certainty that there really isn’t any truth anyway, while the anguished discomfort of not finding any is everyone’s. The progress and conclusion of the other two episodes is very similar. In both the story in fragments leaves many mysteries about the facts and characters, until an event occurs that unmasks an unexpected, obviously sinister dimension, such as the figure of a handsome and good father, who instead turns out to be completely perverse and twisted. It being understood that in all of Lanthimos’ films, starting from Lobster, but especially in the latter, the resolution of every ambiguity fomented by the narrative progression merely implements further misunderstandings, senselessness and, obviously, horrors.

But it is not, however, a nihilistic excavation that seeks unexplored gaps between the cracks of the residual common sense of our time so irremediably disoriented (as the French philosopher Alain Badiou says). The Greek director limits himself, in fact, to packaging a completely spectacular image of contemporary disorientation, throwing winks here and there aimed at distancing himself from extreme cultural drifts or welcoming easy consensus. Thus, if in the sumptuously painted Poor Things an effort was made to flirt more or less clumsily with feminist issues, in this completely dry and much less imaginative Kinds of Kindness, he does not disdain to amuse the public by making fun of the bizarre rites of a mystical sect. These concessions to the most obvious taste only confirm the ultimately artistically modest intentions of Yorgos Lanthimos’ entire cinematic undertaking.

It must be said that like horror proper, psychological horror too has its main vocation in focusing entirely on “special effects”. Special effects, not so much at the level of images and sounds, but at the “psychological” level – admitted and not allowed to assume this term in an essentially commodity sense, as it was the case in the precedent of the so-called “psychological” westerns. It shouldn’t seem excessively malicious, then, to suspect that the immediate release of Kinds of Kindness, at very low cost or very short production time, is largely due to the director’s desire to make the most of the still hot Oscar notoriety received recently.

Trailer:

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Emanuela Zanon

Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.

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