Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe star in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.
Should you arrive late for Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” you will miss its single most rousing moment: an opening blast of that delectably sour 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The song needs no justification; it could kick off every movie from now until kingdom come. Even so, you may wonder what put Lanthimos, the Greek-born director of such acrid downers as “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017), in a specifically Eurythmics mood. Perhaps, after concocting the mad Victorian brew of “Poor Things” (2023), he wanted to signal a shift back to a more contemporary style of weird. Or perhaps he recognized, in the song’s coolly cynical lyrics, a corrosion of spirit to match his own. “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused”: there are worse ways to sum up the cruel spectacles of subjugation that Lanthimos has made such a perverse specialty of.
This story is from the July 01, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the July 01, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The Crackdown
Fighting drug gangs, a young President declares war within his own country.
In Search of Lost Time
The strange journey of John Lennon's stolen Patek Philippe watch.
Books – Everything in Hand
The C.I.A.'s covert ops have mattered-but not in the way that it hoped.
UNHOLY TRINITY
“Kinds of Kindness.”
HERO BALL
Who was the main character of the N.B.A. Finals?
MEDIEVAL LONGING
The fourteenth-century love songs of Guillaume de Machaut.
THE NORTH STAR
Harriet Tubman’ radical faith.
THE TAIWAN TANGLE
Can we deter belligerence in the strait without provoking it?
VINCENT'S PARTY
The party was in full swing. Evelyn could hear the sexy blare of the trad jazz almost as soon as she got off the bus at St. Mary Redcliffe and began walking over to the Steam Packet, the pub that Vincent—who was a friend of Evelyn’s older sister, Moira—had commandeered for the evening.
GROWING PAINS
In Phoenix's upscale suburbs, authorities slowly realized that the Gilbert Goons might be a violent teen gang.