Kinds of Sadness
Yorgos Lanthimos and a BBC YA adaptation provide a pair of lessons in disappointment, while Britain gives us a shark movie classic.
Yorgos stumbles with a tough triptych
There’s something very sad about that moment when you’re watching a film by a director you love and you realise it’s not going to win you over. It’s a little like watching the clock tick past 80 minutes in an England match at the Euros and realising that nothing will change — no substitutes, no energy, and they still keep passing backwards at every opportunity. It brings me no joy at all to report that I experienced this sensation with Yorgos Lanthimos’ wildly ambitious and wilfully indulgent new movie Kinds of Kindness.
The movie is a triptych of narratively separate but thematically linked stories, sharing a rep company of actors. In the first, Jesse Plemons plays a doormat of a man who is entirely in thrall to the boss (Willem Dafoe) who controls his itinerary, diet, reading material, and sex life. The second story sees Plemons as a paranoid man who’s convinced that the woman (Emma Stone) who just returned from a life-and-death disaster is not actually his wife. The final story has Stone and Plemons as members of a cult led by Dafoe, who are searching for a mythic figure with the power to reanimate the dead.
These are inscrutable and mercurial stories linked by ideas of control, submission, and unquestioned devotion. In some ways, it’s a return for Lanthimos to his Greek Weird Wave roots, shedding screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things) in favour of Efthimis Filippou, with whom he wrote all of his movies before that. It’s the duo’s masterful 2009 collaboration Dogtooth, following a controlling father and the grotesque fantasy world he constructs for his sequestered family, that feels like the most obvious analogue for Kinds of Kindness.
Kinds of Kindness is also about the construction of tiny worlds within our own that, while small, feel all-encompassing. Plemons weaponises his trademark taciturn oddity to create three distinct, believable men who wouldn’t know how to fight their corner even if they took a punch straight to the face. Stone, meanwhile, is transformative as three completely different women, showcasing the impressive versatility that pushed her from comedy’s relatable girl next door to a double Oscar winner.
But the problem is that all of this is a bit empty. All three stories feel like thought exercises in self-conscious quirk rather than compelling strands of an epic, fascinating thesis. Each part has value, but none of them are followed through in any meaningful way beyond the murk of their own enigmatic approach. It’s like three opening brainstorms for David Cronenberg movies, waiting for somebody to graft on the substance.
This is most obvious in the second segment, which introduces boundary-pushing ideas around sexuality and, later, cannibalism. Lanthimos and Filippou, as they have in the past, mine these transgressive themes for what’s evidently supposed to be black comedy. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a darkly funny twist, but the glacial pace and lack of a concrete point rather undercuts the handful of illicit chuckles that arrive — mostly as a result of a deliciously deadpan monologue from Stone about dogs.
It’s worth noting at this point that Kinds of Kindness runs for almost three hours, taking great delight in testing the patience of its audience. While Dogtooth was a short, sharp blast of inescapable depravity, Kinds of Kindness stretches its darkness to the point that it becomes mundane — perhaps deliberately — and more than a little boring — almost certainly not deliberately.
The missing piece of the puzzle here is the impish joy that has so often driven Lanthimos and Filippou’s collaborations with the same effervescent recklessness we see from Stone’s character in the final story here, behind the wheel of a purple Dodge Challenger. They relish showing an audience things that disgust and confound them, while also making them laugh through those emotions. The studied emptiness of Kinds of Kindness sees that devilish fun streak replaced by an unwelcome and infuriating sheen of arthouse pretension. I found myself missing the crowd-pleasing sweary repartee of McNamara’s scripts.
This stuff is meant to make you think, but it’s also meant to be fun. In this case, I was often left with neither of those things. I didn’t discover many kinds of kindness, but I did unearth plenty of shades of disappointment.
Kinds of Kindness is in UK cinemas now.
Why does everyone love the wrong shark movie?
People keep asking me if I’ve seen Under Paris — the Netflix shark thriller that half the world seems to have gone gaga for.1 I have seen it. And it’s fine. But while everyone is getting over-excited about some mediocre creature feature fare over on Netflix, there’s a genuinely excellent shark attack horror movie in British cinemas right now. Something in the Water — Hayley Easton Street’s feature directorial debut — is a stone-cold hoot.
The movie follows a group of British friends who have decamped to the Caribbean for a destination wedding. The most adventurous of the group organises a getaway to a secluded island in a slightly questionable boat. When one of them is badly bitten by a shark, things start to go very badly very quickly.
It’s not reinventing the wheel or anything, but much like stone-cold spelunking classic The Descent and Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down — another vastly underrated shark thriller — it thrives because of its characters. This friendship group feels lived-in and real, with Cat Clarke’s script teasing out the tensions and dynamics between the friends. Unsaid secrets tend to become much more said when it’s a life and death scenario.
Like all of the best shark movies, this is not really about the sharks. It’s about what the threat of being torn to pieces by a dead-eyed predator does to human beings who love each other. Considering how much screen time is devoted to a group of young women treading water in the open ocean, it’s impressive how much Street is able to do directorially, helped by those committed performances.
Under Paris might have the advantage of a global Netflix audience and the trashy glint in its eye that tends to turn shark movies into cult hits. But Something in the Water takes the sub-genre seriously and, as a result, it crafts something gripping, memorable, and genuinely thrilling. Even when the sharks aren’t circling.
Something in the Water is in UK cinemas now.
I’d forgotten what this horror feels like…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been burying myself in the delightful world of teen detective Pip Fitz-Amobi. Holly Jackson’s trilogy of books, starting with A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, are uncommonly brilliant YA whodunnits. They follow Pip’s attempts to solve crimes in the Buckinghamshire town of Little Kilton, with her investigations — alongside her buddy/boyfriend Ravi Singh — unravelling the secrets and lies lurking beneath the twee houses and posh families.
The books’ plots aren’t just satisfying; they’re elegant, Swiss watch constructions that feel plausible and logical throughout, while tying all of the threads together in as neat a bow as possible by the final page. They’re genuinely terrific.
So, it was with a deep affection for Jackson’s work that I settled down this week to devour all six episodes of the BBC’s take on the first book: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. It has been a long time since I watched a beloved novel series strangled by a TV or movie adaptation — it seemed to happen every week during my teenage years2 — but that’s very much the vibe I felt watching this series. It’s not bad by any stretch, but it just doesn’t feel right.
A lot of this starts with the casting. Presumably in an attempt to harness the book’s following among the predominantly American denizens of BookTok3, Wednesday star Emma Myers plays Pip. In amongst a cast of bona fide Brits, her stilted attempt at home counties plumminess — she often sounds like she’s painfully straining each word through her teeth — sticks out like an unfortunate sore thumb.
Everyone involved in front of the camera — Myers included — does decent work here, with Zain Iqbal giving cheeseball charm aplenty as Ravi. But the joy of the books is in their meticulousness, presented through Pip’s transcribed interviews, detailed log of events, and expert-level social media sleuthing. None of that stuff is particularly cinematic and so the show ruthlessly truncates her investigation, nodding only when necessary to the fact most of her work involves sitting in front of a computer being clever.
This has the side effect of making Pip a much less impressive protagonist. Instead of following her thread through the labyrinth of the case — in this case the apparent murder of schoolgirl Andie Bell by her boyfriend five years earlier — she seems to blunder from clue to clue. Her progress through the investigation seems as much down to luck — and Ravi’s supernatural ability to join dots — as it does to her brilliance and determination.
There’s also a sheen of Americanism to the whole thing. Much like Sex Education, the setting is a sort of bubblegum transatlantic milieu with elements of US high school movie alongside the tea shops and British acting stalwarts.4 This is most apparent during a scene set at one of the “calamity parties” at which key events take place. In the books, these are just hyped-up house parties, whereas the show imagines them as neon-lit forest raves more akin to an over-cranked American high school movie.
Many of these decisions are entirely reasonable and they’re a part of adaptation. TV is a completely different medium to literature and so they cannot allow stories to unfold in the same way. But A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a creaky simulacrum of the book that does a real disservice to one of the best literary characters I’ve discovered in years by cutting out a huge segment of her most treasured trait: her meticulous, analytical brain.
The show has attracted good reviews, and I can see why. It’s frothy, fun, and that story is dynamite. If I hadn’t experienced the story in its original form, I could see myself really enjoying it. But as a fan of the book, I was left sorely disappointed. Not only was this Pip awkwardly American; she didn’t really feel like Pip at all.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is available to stream in the UK via BBC iPlayer.
Trailer of the Week: Nosferatu
OK, you got me. This trailer came out last week, but I was away and there’s no way I wasn’t going to find a bit of space to talk about Robert Eggers doing Nosferatu. I love everything about this teaser. The visuals are so muted as to be almost as monochrome as the original, save for Gothic lantern flickering and lashings of blood. Willem Dafoe’s facial hair is glorious. The score sounds absolutely bizarre. The cast is stacked. This is going to be a masterpiece. I can feel it in my fangs.
Nosferatu is in UK cinemas from 3rd January 2025.
Next week: I’m still catching up with stuff after my week off, but we’ll definitely do MaXXXine and the minions at some point. What a pairing! That’s not to mention the imminent arrival of a very freaky Nic Cage in Longlegs.
Personally, the most joy I got from it was the first time I saw someone do the pun “Shark de Triomphe”. Genius.
I still carry the scars of turning to a group of book-sceptic teenage friends during The Golden Compass and saying “it’s about to get really good”… only for the credits to roll. They were planning to tell that part of the story in the sequel, but the movie flopped and they never got to make The Subtle Knife at all.
I wrote about the BookTok of it all for Yahoo this week.
Anna Maxwell Martin! Mathew Baynton! Gary Beadle!