Yorgos Lanthimos, who has (besides his bizarre short film installation project Bleat) not released a film since 2018’s The Favourite, is now set to drop two movies just months apart. One of them is Poor Things, the R-rated Frankenstein-esque tale that’s tearing up the film festival circuit, earning awards buzz and is due to arrive in cinemas in December. But he’s also wrapped work on what will follow it in the new year: an anthology film once called And that now has a new title: Kinds of Kindness.
Shot in New Orleans in late 2022, little is known about Kinds of Kindness. But, as its stars jump on the press run ahead of their other projects hitting TV screens and cinemas, we’re getting trickles of details about it. So what’s And about? Who appears in it? And when can we watch it? Here’s everything we know.
What’s the plot of Kinds of Kindness?
All we know is that the film has a unique narrative structure. Hong Chau, Oscar-nominated for her work in The Whale, revealed on Marc Maron’s podcast: “It’s three short stories and we play different characters in each one, so the same actors play different characters.”
“It’s a very, very exciting film,” the film’s cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, told Brazilian site Omelete, who validated Hong’s statement on the film’s three-part structure, and added: “It’s still Yorgos, but it’s got a different sensibility.”
Apparently, Yorgos called it his ‘secret’ film, because, Robbie says, “post-production took so long, and with COVID shutting down some projects, we had a window to shoot. Yorgos said, ‘I don’t want to watch special effects every day [in reference to Poor Things], let’s make another movie!’”
Hong discussed a conversation she had with her co-star in the film, Jesse Plemons, on the aforementioned podcast too. She recalled asked him: “‘So what did you think about the script?’ Because you are all trying to see what the other person thinks and piece things together. I said that I was going to try and re-read the script and figure out what the themes connecting the three stories were, but then I just kind of gave up. And he said, ‘Yeah, same.’”
On top of this, what we do have is some behind-the-scenes footage of Emma Stone on set. In it, she’s seen pushing an incapacitated person through a car park in a wheelchair before dancing wildly to camera.
We also know that, for some reason, she slaps Willem Dafoe’s character. In a profile appearing in T magazine, we learned that, instead of using an off-screen stand in, Willem insisted on being slapped by Emma’s character over and over, despite it technically not being necessary. “That’s what you want from actors,” Yorgos told T in the piece. “To want to be part of it in any way.”
Who is in the cast of Kinds of Kindness?
There’s a lot of doubling up on screen between Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. Emma Stone, Joe Alwyn and Willem Dafoe will all appear in both. On top of that, we also have the aforementioned Jesse and Hong, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer.
According to a new interview with Elle, Yorgos had seen her work in Euphoria. “It’s a little cameo, like two scenes. It’s cool though, and it’s great to be in there,” she told them. “We’d never met before but [Yorgos] had seen Euphoria and was keeping my name around in case a part came up. So, when it did, I flew down to the set in New Orleans immediately.”
When will Kinds of Kindness be released?
Yorgos’ Poor Things had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival, so it may be that Kinds of Kindness follows suit. That’s if, for some reason, Yorgos doesn’t decide to return to the Cannes Film Festival in May, where The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster both bowed. What we do know is that we should see it in 2024.