Are you OK?
On Kinds of Kindness, violence, and why I am actually a bird.
As the final credits for Kinds of Kindness started rolling I turned to Daniel and asked, without quite realizing why, if he was ok. He said he was, but looked as shaken as I felt, and it seemed to take real effort for us to stand and leave the theater.
You’re in Madrid, I reminded myself. It’s 2024, July, and there’s a heat wave, and now it’s dark out and cool enough for dinner. But in the street I still felt frantic. There was just so much violence, Daniel said. I agreed and theorized it was possible that my soul had exited my body in order for my eyes to keep watching.
Yorgos Lanthimos is on a short list of filmmakers whose new work I always see as soon as possible, ideally without knowing anything ahead of time. I did see a trailer to Kindness by chance, but it revealed very little other than the film’s tone— a bit more blunt and neon than usual, but then again all of Lanthimos’s films have been about as different as they can be from each other while …