Kinds Of Kindness Trailer Sees Director Yorgos Lanthimos Getting Weird And Erotic Again

Just a few months after his eccentric alt-history sci-fi movie "Poor Things" swept the Oscars with four wins (including a Best Actress award for lead Emma Stone), director Yorgos Lanthimos is back with a new film. "Kinds of Kindness" once again stars Stone, alongside her fellow "Poor Things" performers Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe. And the talent doesn't stop there, with Jesse Plemons ("Breaking Bad"), Hong Chau ("The Whale"), Joe Alwyn ("The Favourite"), Mamoudou Athie ("Archive 81"), and Hunter Schafer ("Euphoria") also in the mix.

Lanthimos will really be getting the most out of that stellar cast by having each actor in three different roles. "We had started out with one story, but as we were working on it, we thought that it might be interesting to make a film that has a different structure to what we had done before," Lanthimos explains in the press notes, referring to himself and co-writer Efthimis Filippou ("The Killing of a Sacred Deer"). "As we identified the subsequent stories, we wanted to keep a thematic thread, so it felt as if it all belonged under the same umbrella."

"Kinds of Kindness" is described as a triptych, as you can see by the changing hairstyles (and facial hairstyles) of the cast in the new trailer above. "The stories weave together in a way that is not necessarily clear but capitalizes on what has come before," says Stone. This being a Lanthimos film, one of the common themes we can expect is things getting erotic in weird and uncomfortable ways.

While "Poor Things" was set in an alternative Victorian world, "Kinds of Kindness" is "set in a non-specific place, one that is sort of removed from our own," according to producer Ed Guiney. Lanthimos has played around in that kind of space before, with "The Lobster" being set in a somewhat dystopian world where single people who fail to find a spouse are turned into the animal of their choosing. Based on Plemons' description of the three stories, it sound like this film will also touch on those themes of loneliness and the search for human connection:

"The first story is this odd, almost father and son relationship. The second one is safety in marriage and in home. Then, the third has to do with the security that faith provides. Some of Yorgos' characters feel like their own islands, desperately trying to reach each other. It's awkward and uncomfortable and tragic and funny."

One clip from the movie shows Stone's character trying and failing to arrange a foursome over dinner. In a story where Plemons plays a cop, he recounts an interaction where Stone's character "asked me to f*** her in my uniform, then hit me. Hard." Oh yes, things are going to get weird.

"Kinds of Kindness" arrives in theaters on June 21, 2024.