Kinds of Kindness

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Kinds of Kindness boasts three wildly overlong tales that are equally ineffective and punishingly tedious in their impact. Filmmaker Lanthimos, armed with his and Efthimis Filippou’s screenplay, delivers a disastrous misfire that grows less and less interesting (and more and more interminable) as it (very slowly) unfolds, and there’s little doubt that the barely-sketched-out nature of all three stories certainly ensures that one’s attempts at finding something (anything) here to embrace fall hopelessly flat – with the arms-length vibe compounded by Lanthimos’ aggressively meandering sensibilities and ongoing reliance on weird-for-weirdness’-sake elements and attributes. And while Lanthimos has admittedly elicited strong work from his actors, with Jesse Plemons’ memorable, committed efforts an obvious standout, Kinds of Kindness‘ almost total lack of context and exposition paves the way for an absolutely endless endeavor that’s compounded by a ludicrous 164 minute running time – which, when coupled with Lanthimos’ ongoing refusal to say anything interesting about anything, cements the picture’s place as a complete trainwreck that contains virtually nothing worth embracing or getting excited about (ie the movie, when all is said and done, feels like an experiment concocted by none-too-bright adolescents).

no stars out of ****