Kinds of Kindness is a star-studded dark comedy film with Poor Things’ Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, Civil War’s Jesse Plemons, plus Joe Alwyn and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ Hunter Schafer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (the filmmaker behind Poor Things, The Favourite, and The Lobster), the movie consists of three loosely-intertwined stories, with the same actors playing different roles in each one.
Searchlight Pictures describes it as “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.”
In May 2024, Lanthimos told Deadline of the film, which he wrote with Efthimis Filippou, “We told each other, ‘should we try a different structure for a film?’ And we thought about making an anthology, and actually in the beginning, you were supposed to follow the three stories in parallel, but then I had this idea of the same actors playing different characters in the different stories, but that would have been very confusing. And we decided to see how it would work if we separated the stories, and actually they became even stronger.”
He added, “It’s like three short stories, basically. So just by its nature there’s not so much information for the characters or their backstory. Apart from the fact that I like that anyway, to throw people into a world, into certain situations, and to try and figure that out, I find it more engaging.”
Ahead is everything you need to know about streaming Kinds of Kindness, which is now playing in theaters.
How can I stream Kinds of Kindness?
For right now, if you want to watch Kinds of Kindness, you’ll have to head to a movie theater, but it will soon be available to purchase online starting August 27. For those wanting a digital copy, the film will arrive on DVD and Blu Ray October 8.
Poor Things, Searchlight Pictures’ other film starring Stone and Dafoe, is now available to stream on Hulu, so it’s likely that Kinds of Kindness will see the same fate.
This article will be updated.
Bri is the editorial and social media assistant at ELLE.com. Before joining the team at ELLE, she worked as the editorial assistant for Seventeen.com and Cosmopolitan.com where she covered all things celebrity news and pop culture. You can probably find her sipping an oatmilk iced chai while searching for the best new makeup products or thrifting her entire wardrobe.