You know, it seems like every Yorgos Lanthimos release in the guy’s Hollywood-adjacent era follows the same general trajectory. First, the project is announced and forgotten in the whirl of news that comes out of the entertainment business every day. Then a trailer drops, and people get excited, but industry publications start smashing the “troubled production” button — they did that for Poor Things, and they did that for Kinds of Kindness, given that it saw a delay (after all, this movie was shot before Poor Things, so where there’s smoke, right?) — and those hoping to seem cooler than their film-interested pals will say that they knew it was going to be a disaster all along. Then it hits a festival, and the first critics who get to see it freak the fuck out and say how great it was (Poor Things won at Venice, after all), and after Kinds of Kindness screened at Cannes last week, the parallels became truly hard to ignore, given how rapturously it was received over there on the Riviera.
All that leaves is the final step, in which it finally his screens all over the country, and you won’t have to wait very long — as this new trailer that Searchlight dropped on Wednesday is meant to advertise, you’re less than a month away from some brand-new Yorgos wackiness.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis:
“‘Kinds of Kindness’ is a triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”
Kinds of Kindness will finally reveal all of its cryptic secrets to you when it hits theaters on June 21. No matter what’s actually going on here, we think everyone will be able to agree on one fact: Willem Dafoe is positively dripped out here. Good lord, that man has style.