Kinds of Kindness (2024)
dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Searchlight Pictures
Characters describing their dreams is a prominent part of Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest exercise in batshit what-the-fuckery. This salient feature of the picture – which the director cowrote with longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou – is so striking because to describe the movie itself is like telling someone upon waking about a series of dreams you had during the previous night. In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos, the crown prince of Greek Weird Wave cinema, has crafted a movie that makes his last effort, the befuddling Poor Things, look like a classical Hollywood musical by comparison.
Over its 164 minutes, Kinds of Kindness tells a triptych of tales featuring the absurdist, pitch-black comedy and ultraviolence for which Lanthimos is famous. The three short stories are unrelated save for the inclusion in each of a character known only by the initials R.M.F. and the same collection of actors, many of whom are Lanthimos regulars, playing different characters in each tale. (It’s this last detail that most makes the movie feel dreamlike; it’s akin to telling someone you know about a dream you had about them by saying, “You were you, but you weren’t you, you were somebody else.”)
Each story, at its core, is about control, Lanthimos’s predominant thematic preoccupation. Dogtooth is about the control parents exert over their children; The Lobster is an examination of the control that cultures have over individuals; The Favourite explores the control of the powerful over the powerless; Poor Things is about a woman who refuses to let anyone have control over her mind or her body.
The first story in Kinds of Kindness, titled “The Death of R.M.F.”, finds Jesse Plemons’s Robert Fletcher obeying, to the most minute detail, the instructions of his overbearing and exacting boss, Raymond, played by Willem Dafoe. Raymond is so involved in his employee’s life – the two are also lovers – that he orchestrated the meeting of Robert and his wife, Sarah, played by Hong Chau.
Unbeknownst to Sarah, Raymond even forbids the couple from having children, horrifically mandating a surreptitious use of the abortion drug mifepristone to ensure they remain childless. Robert follows a strict list of daily instructions from Raymond, which includes telling him when he will rise and go to bed, what books to read (and for how long each day to read them), what he will eat at each meal, and even when he is allowed to have sex with Sarah.
Finally, the day comes when Robert refuses to obey an order. Raymond wants Robert to slam his Ford Bronco into another car hard enough to kill the other driver. When he refuses to try again after an unsuccessful first attempt, Raymond unceremoniously cuts Robert out of his life and gives the assignment to another of his employees, Rita, played by Emma Stone.
The word toxic has become a buzzword in recent years for many destructive behaviors or traits, like toxic masculinity. In “The Death of R.M.F.”, Lanthimos has his sights trained on toxic work culture, in which the employee is encouraged (and, let’s be honest, expected) to “be a team player,” which usually means working long hours and forsaking personal happiness for the good of the company.
Lanthimos takes this most American of culture traits – living to work instead of working to live – to its most absurdist and blackly comedic extreme. People who regularly sacrifice their weekends, holidays, and other fleeting bits of free time in order to climb the corporate ladder must feel like Robert being asked to commit vehicular homicide. In this scenario, the person they’re being asked to snuff out is themselves. Toxic work culture – with good vibes only! – can begin to feel like a cult, so it’s not surprising that Kinds of Kindness’s third tale drops the pretense completely and focuses on people involved in exactly that.
The middle section of the triptych, titled “R.M.F. is Flying”, finds Plemons playing a character named Daniel, a police officer. Daniel’s wife Liz, played by Emma Stone, is a marine biologist who has been lost at sea for some time. Daniel is heartbroken and inconsolable. In one of the most bizarre comedic moments in recent cinematic history, Daniel invites his patrol partner and best friend, Neil, and Neil’s wife, Martha, over to his house for what was the two couples’ regular dinner date night.
Neil is played by Mamoudou Athie, who was a minor character in “The Death of R.M.F.”, and Martha is portrayed by Margaret Qualley, who turned up as Raymond’s wife in the first segment. Towards the end of the dinner, Daniel asks his guests if they can watch a video taken of the quartet before Liz went missing. Neil and Martha are hesitant, but relent when Daniel begins uncontrollably weeping. We expect to see a video of the four on a hike during a vacation or some other anodyne event they all shared.
Shocked and bemused laughter came from the audience – and definitely from me! – when a smash cut reveals that the video in question is of the four engaged in group sex. Lanthimos’s wacked out sense of humor shines brightest in this moment, but it becomes curdled and disturbing in the last segment of Kinds of Kindness when the sex is nonconsensual.
Things become more bizarre still when Liz is rescued – in a helicopter flown by the mysterious R.M.F. – and returns to Daniel. Liz acts out of character upon her return: she previously hated chocolate, but wolfs down a whole chocolate cake; also, none of her shoes fit now. Daniel is convinced this Liz is an imposter and he goes about proving so in ways involving a severed thumb and a miscarriage.
The theme of control in “R.M.F. is Flying” is explored in Daniel trying to bend others to his will when his life is turned upside down upon Liz’s return. Dafoe turns up in this tale as Liz’s father, George, and Hong Chau has mere seconds on the screen as the wife of Liz’s research partner.
For “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, the cast shuffles once again. Plemons and Stone play, respectively, Andrew and Emily, two members of a mysterious sex cult headed by Omi, played by Dafoe. Chau plays Omi’s wife, Aka, and Athie is in a minor role as a morgue employee.
Omi has decreed that a woman exists who can resurrect the dead. He has divided his cult members into teams of two and instructed them to search for this hidden prophet. One of the criteria for this mysterious woman is that she has a twin who is dead.
After Emily and Andrew test (and fail) a woman who claims she can raise the dead, Emily tells her partner about a dream she had in which she was trapped at the bottom of a pool but couldn’t drown. In the dream, she is saved by a woman who looks strikingly like a waitress serving the two at a roadside diner. Qualley pulls double duty in this segment as both Rebecca, the waitress, and her twin sister, Ruth, whom the former believes to be the sought after prophet.
It’s not hard to suss out what type of control Lanthimos is exploring in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, since cults are defined by the rigid control their leaders exert over the followers. He does complicate things when we see Emily surreptitiously visit the husband and young daughter she left behind when she joined the cult. As I mentioned above, the absurdist, black comedy of Kinds of Kindness becomes anything but funny when Emily’s husband, Joseph – played by Joe Alwyn, who, like the rest of the cast rotates into a different role in each vignette – convinces Emily to have a drink with him after their daughter has gone to bed.
What happens next is sickening. Rae mentioned to me after the screening that it might have been Lanthimos’s intent to illustrate one more form of control, which might explain why Emily felt the need to run from her family and into the arms of a cult. Rae expanded that idea to argue that the film’s title could be taken sincerely, instead of ironically, as I read it.
Each situation in the anthology could be read as a (twisted) sort of kindness. In the first, Robert’s boss gives excruciatingly precise instructions to someone who is incapable of making decisions on his own. In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, the cult provides a kind of kindness that Emily couldn’t find at home. I’m not sure I buy the argument – I think Lanthimos might be too filled with Kubrickian cynicism about the virtues of the human race – but it’s a provocative way to put the striking puzzle pieces that Lanthimos offers up in Kinds of Kindness together.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Really more of a twist on The Twilight Zone than anything else, Kinds of Kindness scratches the weird itch and provides surprises at every turn. Plus, who doesn’t love a good anthology?
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Lending credence to my introduction about dreams, the movie opens with the Eurythmics hit Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) booming on the soundtrack.
- The reveal of Dafoe in shorts and knee-high black socks in the first segment is priceless.
- Musician Jerskin Fendrix, whose debut film score was for Lanthimos’s Poor Things, delivers a piano-heavy orchestration that is as unnerving as the piano cue in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. His use of the word “no” from a thundering chorus is put to striking use.
- The most exciting thing about Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons — besides their engrossing performances — is their choice of projects. They have become two actors whose presence alone in a movie or TV show is enough to make me interested to learn more.
- With mere minutes left in Kinds of Kindness, I was delighted when Stone delivers the trademark weird dance sequence that Lanthimos includes in most of his movies.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Rae and I saw this at the Texas Theatre with a crowd of a couple dozen others. I cherished the awkward laughter that the movie inspired throughout.