Amidst the stilted strangeness of each piece of the triptych that makes up Kinds of Kindness, there’s a point when the audience’s confused, uncomfortable laughter turns into genuine gasps of surprise. Even if the audience is paying attention to the film, they may not truly grasp the lens through which writers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimus Filippou view humanity. Their script for Kinds of Kindness, as well as their other English-language collaborations (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), have a nihilistic view of humanity.
Their film is about the way in which humans force control on one another and how those controlled humans crave that power over their lives. The controlled see it as a form of love. They’ve tricked themselves into believing these controllers to be benign and benevolent dictators. The way Lanthimos and Filippou have written these characters, we see no sympathy for them. We see only disgust that they can’t find the strength to overcome this strange indoctrination they’ve undergone. This script defiles the human spirit, and it is absolutely, intriguingly excellent.
Kinds of Kindness has an intelligence that takes a moment to think through. The script gets deep into the bowels of humanity and shows us a metaphor for the systems we let govern us. This oppression is one we allow in our lives because it’s all we’ve ever known. The few will always retain power over the many because we let them tell us they love us and falsely believe they mean it. Kinds of Kindness not only points out human foibles but takes us a step further in understanding how far our blind faith may take us down a dark, soulless path. It joins past Best Original Screenplay winners like Get Out, written by Jordan Peele, and Promising Young Woman, written by Emerald Fennell, that hold up something deeply disturbing that we rarely confront in our society.
On the other end of the spectrum are, well, many movies this year, really, but the best example, the best written of them, I think, is Ghostlight. The film is written by its co-director Kelly O’Sullivan, whose previous feature, Saint Francis, is a criminally underseen gem. O’Sullivan posits that we can’t all do it on our own, any of the great “its” of our lives. Humans, as flawed as we are, need community because a community can heal with empathy.
The brilliance of O’Sullivan’s script is that there are no instant or easy answers. The main character, Dan (Keith Kupferer), doesn’t pick up a copy of a play and suddenly realize how much he now understands his own grief. The script builds up to it as Dan learns to put his trust in his community and he finds a way to understand his anger and grief through art. Not only are you weeping through Dan’s understanding, but you are laughing along with a perfect balance of humor and heart.
Theater, film, and all the arts can bring out a wellspring of human empathy. The audience may never have gone through what Dan has gone through, seen what he’s seen, but through Kelly O’Sullivan’s terrific words, we can find that place inside us that understands and feels. We bring our own pain and wants and needs into the experience of watching the film, and its ending gives us hope. Ghostlight doesn’t shy away from that pain, but it shows us that all isn’t lost when we lose something we love because we still have love to give and people to give love to us, freely and without reservations. It joins past Best Original Screenplay winners like Milk, written by Dustin Lance Black, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, that tap into something deeper and communal in our shared human experience.
This year, like many before it, could come down to a clash of philosophies. It could come down to whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty. Each point of view is valid, but either could show where people’s hearts and minds are just now.
***
Here is where I see the Best Original Screenplay race as of now.
- Challengers – Justin Kuritzkes
- Civil War – Alex Garland
- Ghostlight – Kelly O’Sullivan
- I Saw the TV Glow – Jane Schoenbrun
- Kinds of Kindness – Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimus Filippou
