Cannes Daily: 'Disturbing,' 'Dark-Hearted'
'Kinds of Kindness' — the latest Yorgos Lanthimos/Emma Stone collab — polarizes. Can it be their next awards winner?
What do you do next after winning an Oscar? For some best actress Oscar recipients, it’s been a bedeviling decision. In one of the more extreme examples, Renée Zellweger took home the gold for playing Judy Garland in 2019’s Judy, but won’t be seen back on the big screen until Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the latest iteration of that franchise, arrives in 2025.
But for the most recent best actress winner, Emma Stone, honored for her go-for-broke performance as a re-animated woman in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, it wasn’t a question of what she’d do next but instead when her next movie would be coming to theaters. By the time she stepped on stage at the Dolby Theatre to accept her Academy Award, she’d already completed production on Lanthimos’ newest film, Kinds of Kindness, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Friday night and will be released stateside by Searchlight Pictures on June 21.
In the somewhat ironically titled Kindness, Lanthimos spins three separate and increasingly strange contemporary tales as his cast, which includes Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley in addition to Stone, take on different roles in each of the weird stories. Written by Lanthimos and his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, the film doesn’t quite take place in The Twilight Zone — the stories don’t contain any of those final twists that explain everything that came before — but they could be said to exist in a world that is certainly Twilight Zone-adjacent.
There is plenty that’s askew in Lanthimos’ universe as characters struggle for dominance and control over each other. In the first episode, Plemons plays a man whose every move is dictated by his boss, played by Dafoe; in the second, Plemons becomes a suspicious husband to Stone’s self-sacrificing wife; and in the third, Stone moves to center stage as the acolyte in thrall to Dafoe’s sex-cult leader.
For audiences who remember Stone most fondly as the tuneful, aspiring actress in La La Land, Kindness should come with a big trigger warning. As she demonstrated in Poor Things, Stone is fearlessly willing to do almost anything Lanthimos asks of her. Once again, her characters throw themselves into explicit sexual situations with abandon and also venture into areas like self-mutilation that are not for the squeamish.
Certainly, Stone and Lanthimos — they also worked together on 2018’s The Favourite — are becoming one of Hollywood’s most creative actress-director teams, with Stone playing a sort of muse for Lanthimos’ idiosyncratic vision. It’s a tradition that stretches from Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg through Gina Rowlands and John Cassavetes. Who knows where Lanthimos and Stone will take it next.
But, “he’s my muse,” Stone insisted of Lanthimos when the two appeared at their official Cannes press conference following the movie’s premiere. She explained, “I feel like I can do anything with him because we’ve worked together so many times. I trust him beyond the trust I’ve had with any other director, and I’ve been lucky to work with some great directors. But we just have something I can’t explain and I’m so grateful for it.” Having first met the Greek director 10 years ago for a lunch to discuss The Favourite, she said, “He’s warm and easy to talk to and very different from what his films are.” She added, “I’m drawn to his stories. I’m drawn to his films. I’m drawn to his way of seeing the world.”
For the moment, of course, there’s also the question of whether Kindness will result in back-to-back Oscar nominations for either Stone or Lanthimos. The film could prove too provocative for more conventional Academy types, but with the Academy becoming more international, there may be others who welcome the Greek auteur’s provocations in the face of convention. If anything, it should prove that Stone isn’t letting the weight of an Oscar win inhibit her in any way going forward.
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Today’s Screen Jury at Cannes
The long-running Screen International Jury Grid is a critical ranking of competition films in Cannes, according to an assembled jury of 12 international film critics, including Screen's reviewers. Click here for the full grid that includes today’s latest, featuring the wide spectrum of opinion on Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness — though it is now the highest-rated film overall — as well Paul Schrader’s latest, Oh, Canada.
