Yorgos Lanthimos’s new movie with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons is not the comedy-drama audiences might be expecting — instead, it’s an extremely dark, extremely funny horror-comedy.

Kinds of Kindness will alienate audiences looking for a light romp, but horror fans will have a great time with this anthology film. 

The movie runs two hours and 45 minutes and is divided into three bloody parts, with the first skewering entitled CEOs and their middle-managing minions.

It’s the least successful of the three stories. 

Jesse Plemons plays Robert, a man whose life is decided for him by a controlling boomer boss played to hilarious effect by Willem Defoe. 

Robert doesn’t get to decide where he lives or what he eats and lives a small life in an ugly but expensive home. Then, his boss asks for something that he can’t provide. Antics ensue.

This first instalment in the anthology is a little long, meandering in its effort to make its point. It can also be confusing and doesn’t give audiences much to grab onto in the way of relatable characters or plot. 

Bored audiences might wonder if Lanthimos, who has had major hits in The Favorite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), lost his touch on this one — but the opposite is true. 

In this first, gentler, short film, Lanthimos is setting the table for the rest of his anthology, and it’s worth sticking with it to its outrageous and sinister conclusion. 

Then audiences are dropped into a new terrifying tale, and another, in rapid succession, with the same cast playing very different parts. At this point, things get delightfully terrifying.

3 bloody parts

It would be a disservice to explain the plot of all three instalments. Part of the fun of this anthology is losing your bearings in the incredible worlds that Lanthimos has built and having absolutely no idea where the stories are headed.

So without ruining too much of the film, here’s what you need to know: The movie is not the drama-comedy it is being billed as. 

If audiences want a fun, satirical comedy similar to his other recent films, this isn’t it.

Instead, Kinds of Kindness shares a lot of DNA with Lanthimos’s Killing of a Scared Deer (2017). That psychological horror cast Barry Keogan as a young man tormenting a family because of its morally dubious patriarch, played by Colin Farrell. 

Unlike The Favorite and Poor Things, Killing of a Sacred Deer didn’t rack up a ton of Oscar nominations. That’s no surprise, with the academy and most critics largely ignoring horror in discussions about award-worthy filmmaking. 

That’s a shame, because in Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos continues to prove himself to be a filmmaker at the height of his power, working with A-list celebrities. He’s creating the type of horror that gets inside your brain and won’t let go — from its disturbing imagery to its biblical story-telling.

Modern horror doesn’t have to be flashy

The stories in Kinds of Kindness are cynical, and that can make them uncomfortable and off-putting at points.

But Kinds of Kindness is sharper than its predecessors, and Lanthimos has added a lot of of laugh-out-loud moments.

The film moves seamlessly from horror to comedy, and it has a clear point of view on our modern ills — from the consequences of capitalism to an unmitigated mental health crisis and a perpetual lack of safety for women. 

Lanthimos is showing horror fans he knows what scares us in 2024, and he can elicit terror without all the familiar tricks of the genre.

Kinds of Kindness never relies on dark lighting, fantastical settings or jump scares to build tension. 

In place of that, almost all the stories take place in broad daylight, with characters in boring or ugly clothing. The settings are concrete offices and uninspired early 2000s lounge decor.

This movie is not flashy and doesn’t feel like a major studio blockbuster. Instead, it’s an occasionally drab and dead-pan skewering of how we live today, making it much more frighteningly realistic.

A-listers create top-tier horror-comedy

Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are some of the biggest names in Hollywood right now, so audiences wouldn’t necessarily expect to see them in a big summer horror movie. 

But Stone is a longtime collaborator of Lanthimos, having won the Academy Award for best actress earlier this year for her work in Poor Things.

Horror fans are the beneficiaries of that long-standing collaboration, with Stone bringing a steady hand to some incredibly difficult scenes and pulling off increasingly wild stunts. 

Plemons is a great complement to Stone, with a series of understated but really effective performances.

With a return to dark material, you might expect to see Plemons’s signature dead-eyed stare (that one he had in Breaking Bad and Civil War), but you won’t find it in this movie. In its place is a beautifully nuanced performance as a series of weak men with questionable motives. 

Defoe, Margaret Qualley (Drive Away Dolls) and Mamoudou Athie (Archive 81) round out the star-studded cast, playing a selection of weirdos who deliver some truly hilarious lines.

Hong Chau (who you might remember from The Menu) is given the least to work with, showing up repeatedly to play a wife to a job-obsessed loser, a cult leader and a guy who is lost at sea. 

This is not a perfect movie, but it’s a strong addition to the modern horror canon. If audiences are able to get past the slightly misleading trailer and marketing, they’ll be delighted to have seen it. 

The movie debuts in theatres on Friday. 

WATCH | Kinds of Kindness trailer: