Following four Oscar wins just a few months ago for his Emma Stone-starrer Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos unveiled his latest feature at Cannes’ Grand Theatre Lumiere this evening. His three-hour absurdist anthology Kinds of Kindness, also starring Stone as well as Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons, reaped a six-minute ovation.
The Searchlight Pictures title also stars Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer.
The anthology movie is described as a “triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”
In her review for Deadline, Stephanie Bunbury called it “puzzling, brilliant and, in all honesty, not easy to like.”
The pic is the Greek filmmaker’s fourth at the festival following 2009’s Dogtooth, 2015’s The Lobster and 2017’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer.
Dogtooth wound up winning the Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard Award and the Youth Award and went on to launch the filmmaker to global audiences, becoming Greece’s Oscar entry and International Film nominee. The Lobster here at Cannes would win the Jury Prize and Queer Palm with Killing of a Sacred Deer nothing a Best Screenplay win at the fest.