Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Actor prize for Jesse Plemons. The film was Lanthimos' first feature after the back-to-back Oscar campaigns for The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) — both of which had won Best Actress for Olivia Colman and Emma Stone respectively — and it marks a deliberate return to the colder, more austere register of his Greek-language work (Dogtooth, Alps) and his English-language debut The Lobster.

The screenplay is by Lanthimos with Efthimis Filippou, the Greek co-writer with whom Lanthimos developed his early features and who had not collaborated with him on the warmer Tony McNamara-scripted projects in between. The cast plays multiple roles across three loosely-connected stories: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie. Cinematography is by Robbie Ryan, the longtime Lanthimos collaborator who shot both The Favourite and Poor Things; the score is by Jerskin Fendrix, who had also scored Poor Things.

The film was distributed by Searchlight Pictures, Lanthimos' regular American distributor since the Element Pictures partnership, and grossed approximately $20 million worldwide on a moderate art-house release. Critics divided sharply on whether the triptych structure and chillier tone represented a return to form (Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight & Sound) or a step backwards from the more accessible recent work (Variety, Vulture). The film was followed by Lanthimos' next collaboration with Stone and Plemons, Bugonia (2025).