Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Three separate stories, one director's fixation on control and cruelty, and a cast willing to disappear into each: "Kinds of Kindness" is Yorgos Lanthimos at his most fragmented and most unsettling.
What is Kinds of Kindness about?
The film is built as an anthology of three loosely connected tales, each returning the same ensemble of actors to wildly different roles and moral positions. In the first, a man's entire existence is dictated by an employer who controls every choice down to what he eats and who he loves. The second follows a police officer whose wife returns from being lost at sea, except something about her no longer feels right to him. The third centers on a woman searching for a figure she believes can raise the dead, pulling her into a cult built around blind devotion. Across all three, the film circles the same questions: what people will trade for approval, safety, or belonging, and how thin the line runs between kindness and control. Rather than resolving into a single message, the anthology structure lets contradictions sit side by side, daring the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
Cast & crew
Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe each play multiple roles across the three segments, alongside Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Hunter Schafer, giving the ensemble a chance to show range within a single film.
Context & significance
Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with longtime co-writer Efthymis Filippou for a script that returns to the colder, more clinical register of his earlier work after the more accessible tone of his recent films. The anthology format lets him examine obedience and self-erasure from three separate angles rather than one continuous plot.
Where & how to watch
"Kinds of Kindness" is available on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles once you log into a free account. The platform's Farsi-first design makes it simple for Persian-speaking audiences abroad to search, browse, and settle into a film built for close attention.