There’s always an absence or ambiguity of identity in Lanthimos films. Characters only perform to become instead of the other way around, and what often happens is they become puppets who are mobilised and whose gestures and dialogues only metaphorical.
Being one of the films full of such “faceless” puppets, Kinds of Kindness (or should I say manipulation) captures the absurdity of social relations on its symbolic level, no more than that. In indulging himself in voyeurism, exotic plots and nasty representations of bodies, I am afraid Lanthimos didn’t leave us anything but a dry hump.
