Poor Things stars Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe reunite with Yorgos Lanthimos for the first look at Kinds of Kindness.
A teaser for the “triptych fable,” previously titled AND, gave fans a first look at the film, which in its official synopsis follows “a man without a choice who tries to take control of his 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.”
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“This is it. The moment of truth,” says Stone in a voiceover as a purple sports car drifts. The 45-second teaser gives glimpses at each of the film’s stars, many of whom are previous Lanthimos collaborators — Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer.
Fans know that the excitement of anticipating the Greek director’s films comes from what they don’t know. The Kinds of Kindness preview keeps audiences guessing, both unveiling much and little: a body being dragged away in a drab hallway; Plemons being slapped by Qualley; Stone dancing in broad daylight in front of a whip; Chau licking an underwear-clad torso; Alwyn manically screaming while embracing his own fist.
Stylistically, the teaser invites comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but Lanthimos makes sure that his signature filmmaking touches are present throughout the preview, featuring various black-and-white shots including a stunning underwater scene.
The Oscar-nominated director previously opened up about his upcoming project during a British Film Institute event in London, teasing it as a “contemporary film.”
“It’s three different stories, and we’re finishing the edit right now, and I still can’t tell you exactly what it is about,” Lanthimos said at the event in January. “But I also wouldn’t want to tell you what I thought the stories are about because it just makes it so small. I try not to even think about it during the process because I’m afraid that it will make my choices more narrow.”
Kinds of Kindness comes on the heels of Stone’s Oscar win for her role of Bella Baxter in the filmmaker’s Poor Things. The film marks the pair’s fourth one together. They previously collaborated on 2018’s The Favourite, which garnered 10 Oscar noms, including best supporting actor for Stone.
Lanthimos directed the film from a script he co-wrote with Efthimis Filippou, whom he has also worked with multiple times on films like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Kinds of Kindness is slated to hit theaters June 21.
