Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe star in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.
Should you arrive late for Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” you will miss its single most rousing moment: an opening blast of that delectably sour 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The song needs no justification; it could kick off every movie from now until kingdom come. Even so, you may wonder what put Lanthimos, the Greek-born director of such acrid downers as “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017), in a specifically Eurythmics mood. Perhaps, after concocting the mad Victorian brew of “Poor Things” (2023), he wanted to signal a shift back to a more contemporary style of weird. Or perhaps he recognized, in the song’s coolly cynical lyrics, a corrosion of spirit to match his own. “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused”: there are worse ways to sum up the cruel spectacles of subjugation that Lanthimos has made such a perverse specialty of.
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