Testimony of a director: "Life is stranger than film"

Often used, the sentence "life beats the film" is confirmed even from inside the cinema. Directors and screenwriters are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the strange reality around us. Director Yorgos Lanthimos said that his films, dark comedies, are less strange than what is happening in the world. Lanthimos is known thanks to absurd comedies such as "The Lobster", in which single people transform themselves if they cannot find a partner, or "Poor Things", a film inspired by the story of Frankenstein. His new film, selected in the official Cannes competition, is no exception. "Kinds of Kindness" is a story in three parts, with different epic threads, but with the same actors and themes, including paranoia, power dynamics in relationships and the threshold of violence. "Don't you think there's something wrong with the world? Maybe to a greater extent than the films we make'', said Lanthimos during a press conference. "My work and other people's work probably reflects the world and we try to do that as best we can," he said at the press conference attended by Emma Stone and actors Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe. The reviews the film received were mostly favorable: Variety called it "a confused mix designed to astonish and delight in equal measure", while The Guardian described it as a "macabre, absurd triptych" and given four stars out of five.

The film was originally inspired by the eccentric Roman emperor Caligula and the idea that one man can have complete control over another, Lanthimos said. However, the director did not provide more details and said that his creative process is instinctive rather than intellectual. "And I think it's more valid for the people who watch the film to form their own vision", the director told the journalists. "Kinds of Kindness" is the third collaboration between Emma Stone and Lanthimos after "The Favourite" and "Poor Things", a film that won several Oscars this year.