Let this be the final Emma Stone & Yorgos Lanthimos collab, please！

With a sense of morbid curiosity, I watched "Kinds of Kindness", which has a runtime of 2 hours and 43 minutes, and was left feeling both miserable and fascinated. A strong emotion welled up inside me, making me want to cry out:

Emma, I love you, but I really don't like your performances in Yorgos Lanthimos' films. I feel it's a form of torture for you, and for me as well.

Forgive my irrationality. I'm not saying Lanthimos is a bad director, or that "Kinds of Kindness" is a bad film. In my perception, it feels like something Lanthimos casually made after finishing "Poor Things." It consists of three characteristically absurd and violent stories, a style reminiscent of his earlier works. However, after watching so many of his films, the audience has grown aesthetically fatigued (or been sufficiently tortured). The preposterousness of the plots and supernatural elements are no longer sufficient reasons for their fragmented expressions.

But don't misunderstand me. I've enjoyed watching Lanthimos' films for a long time, especially his early works: "Dogtooth," "The Lobster," "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," and so on. No one would deny that he's a director with a distinct style. His films—from the plots to cinematography to musical elements—are always absurd, unrestrained, and filled with rebelliousness, sometimes even violence. He uses these implausible and violent stories to satirize and deconstruct authority and control in real life. Patriarchy, totalitarianism, and utopian violence—these have been some of the many themes he's attempted to present in his films.

I used to really like his approach. (If you're interested, you might want to check out my review of "Dogtooth.") Among countless seemingly logically rigorous political dramas that actually don't withstand scrutiny, it's refreshing to see Lanthimos use jumpy/groundless/irrational plots to complete a very thematically rigorous story. For example, although the character dialogues often seem ordinary, the characters' behaviors are extremely abnormal. If I were to write a dialogue in Lanthimos' style, it might go something like this:

"Good morning, would you like some coffee?" "Good morning, coffee sounds good, I really need a cup, thank you. I'm exhausted from dealing with that corpse last night." "Yes, these coffee beans are quite nice, we should probably buy more next time. Next time we should dispose of the body faster, so we can get home earlier for dinner."

Although the plots of Lanthimos's films are often jumpy and nonsensical, when we finish watching them and want to review what he was trying to express, the themes are clearly visible. For instance, although the dialogue in "Kinds of Kindness" sounds ordinary, the film is full of sudden ridiculous plots. In the second story, a man longs for his missing wife and suggests watching their old videotapes during a friends gathering. This seems like a very normal request. But when the videotapes are shown, the audience feels the awkwardness and absurdity: they are videos of them having sex with another couple, who are also their friends.

The sex scene doesn't last long and has almost no obvious impact on the story development. For me, I think the incorporation of sex is unnecessary. Stone's body has already been exposed enough in Lanthimos' films. The four-person sex scene seems more like a plot device set up to increase the film's morbid appeal. Of course, some people think it's quite meaningful because it shows that there isn't much difference between higher emotions represented by longing and instinctive sexual desire. Okay, I accept this explanation too.

Indeed, meaningful yet nonsensical plots are a characteristic of Lanthimos' films. From this perspective, his films are a kind of alternative feel-good movie, which are grossly discomforting to watch but irresistibly engrossing.

However, even the boldest style becomes uninteresting when repeated too much. I feel that "Kinds of Kindness" marks the downfall of Lanthimos. The theme of this film seems to be the change in human nature in manipulative relationships—between bosses and subordinates, between husbands and wives, and between individuals and groups. The deepening of such relationships causes people to become irrational animals. The subordinate crosses the line and chooses to kill his superior, the wife chooses suicide to obey her husband, and the cult member kidnaps others to return to the cult.

People losing rationality under authority and control, and moving towards a state of perversion, a kind of savage animality, is a common plot in Lanthimos' films. But unlike "Dogtooth" and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" which explain how these manipulative relationships come about, how they are established, and how they influence people, "Kinds of Kindness" doesn't. The film only presents the results of people who have already been controlled and alienated, with almost no mention of how things started and progressed. This also led to me feeling irritated while watching. Especially since I've become quite familiar with the absurdity of his stories, the absurdity of "Kinds of Kindness" no longer brings me any new feelings, and the 160-odd-minute runtime added to my woes.

Frankly speaking, "Kinds of Kindness" is not badly made, it's just too long and too fragmented. Perhaps Lanthimos could consider editing it to be shorter? Or he could have simply divided it into three independent short films, rather than insisting on putting them together, creating some obscure commonalities among them, and using the same cast for everything.

But this is not to say that watching "Kinds of Kindness" didn't give me any new insights. As I was watching it, I tried to find connections with Lanthimos' past films and discovered that he seems to have a fear of being replaced. The three controlled subjects in "Kinds of Kindness" carry the same fear. In his 2019 short film "Nimic," this fear is also prominent. However, I rarely experience it myself. I guess I've long accepted the fact that I don't possess any irreplaceable qualities.

Is Lanthimos worried about losing his irreplaceability? Maybe. That's why he tirelessly repeats his style. I'm not sure if continuing this repetition is a good thing or not.

But there's something I can say with certainty: Emma, you've already gotten everything you can from collaborating with Lanthimos: strange acting methods, frenzied and paranoid character roles, and an Oscar. If you continue to work with him, you won't get more. You might even get stuck in overly intense performances from which you can't extricate yourself. Work with a different director. Take a breather from such atypical movies.