Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director whose absurd brand of surrealism is triumphing in Hollywood

If the Yorgos Lanthimos who directed Kinetta (2005) — his first film which was considered personal, cryptic and sordid in its depiction of sex and violence, with barely any dialogue, no music and no clear narrative — had been told he would be doing virtually the same thing 20 years later and just as boldly, but now in Hollywood, working with stars like Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe; that his movies would have emerged from their niche, would be praised not only by most critics but also by the public, and that his work would collect 22 Oscar nominations and five statuettes, he would have collapsed laughing. The few movie-goers who watched his first forays into the exploration of cruelty, even before Dogtooth (2009) — the movie that brought him international status in festivals and theaters — would also have been nothing short of aghast.

This is one of the most outstanding virtues of this 50-year-old Athenian, director of the award-winning The Favourite and Poor Things, who has just released Kinds of Kindness, starring Stone, Dafoe and Jesse Plemons: to have been faithful to his postulates, to his boldness, to his singularity, to his wild power of agitation, changing certain formal aspects along the way to return to the essence of the language forged in Dogtooth. To evolve by being the same. To provoke first a few and then a few more, to end up subjugating everyone to a twisted cinema that does not have to deal with shame. It is as if the Spanish-Mexican director, Luis Buñuel, who went to the U.S. in 1930 to try to break into Hollywood after causing a sensation in France with the surreal one-hour comedy Age of Gold, had been given the opportunity to work freely, with the best actors and the most prestigious professionals in the realms of art, photography, music and production design, not to mention having all the money in the world at his disposal, and had ended up making movies right there such as The Exterminating Angel, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Simon of the Desert, Viridiana or Belle de Jour. Well, that is just what Lanthimos has achieved, albeit in a different era.

In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos has returned to his pure, uncut beginnings without having left home at all. It is a movie consisting of three independent stories of approximately 55 minutes each and filmed during the tempestuous digital post-production of Poor Things, though written over almost a decade with Lanthimos’ main co-writer, Efthymis Philippou, and casting the same actors in different roles.

Above all, Lanthimos has returned to the kind of rigorous framing and camera movements found in Dogtooth and Alps, while leaving behind his famous wide-angle shots that he experimented with in the magnificent The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which reached their zenith in The Favourite and Poor Things, with viewers invited to watch the action through a peephole. The distorted view offered via a lens here gives way to the simple internal distortion of his characters. These are men and women who must deal with control and violence, with the hatred of a conventional life and with the radical excesses of fanaticism.

Lanthimos’ movies are contemporary allegories of the human condition in which, despite their strangeness, they manage to find parallels in our everyday life: in the horror of gender violence, in sex as a natural impulse and as an almost physiological need, in the family as a false representation of comfort, in our upbringings as physical and psychological prisons from which we cannot escape, and in submission to any kind of power.

In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos’ characteristic surrealism is center stage; his search for a super-reality inspired by the absurd; his meeting of the conscious and the unconscious. Once again, he does it with almost Brechtian distancing, as if the script was being read from a phone book. It is a technique common to his Greek films, fabulously understood by the excellent Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and here embroidered by Jesse Plemons in the first of the stories — and the best of the three — a formidable vignette in which the director and his writing partner Philippou reconstruct their Greek origins for modern times: that of the classical tragedy in which the gods control everything — here, represented by the boss played by Dafoe who compels, massacres, manipulates, orders and decides — as though resurrecting as an adult the disturbing teenager played by Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

It is a game of Greek masks shaped by the decision to have a handful of performers change their roles in each of the three stories. And so, they are always different while being the same; and are always the same while being different. Different costumes for an analogous dramatic framework. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” as the proverb says. Lanthismos’ is the cinema of the cruelty of an author who bequeaths a series of dialogues that will stay with us, perhaps driven by that line uttered by Daniel played by Jesse Plemons, “I want you to cut off a finger, maybe your thumb, and cook it for me as dinner,” and a set of indelible images and sensations, accompanied by music composed by Jerskin Fendrix.

Inspired by Albert Camus’ Caligula, and divided into episodes in the manner of Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, Kinds of Kindness will lead viewers to look at empty swimming pools in a new light. And the more artistically disturbed among us, as the director himself contentedly admits to being, will be reduced to convulsed laughter in places. Lanthimos is for wise audiences who are not afraid of anything because art is free and must subjugate, even to the point of annoyance. It is a brand of cinema where the film will be distributed, curiously by none other than Disney — Lanthimos’ absurdity, as both tragedy and comedy.

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