Kinds of Kindness May Test Your Patience
4 min read
When I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s breakout 2009 film, the surreal and violent fable Dogtooth, I did not think the director was destined to grow into a Hollywood brand. Yet that’s exactly what has happened to the Greek filmmaker, whose fascination with human brutality has not stopped him from becoming a recurring Oscar favorite who makes crossover art-house hits. Lanthimos’s steady rise culminated in last year’s Poor Things, which was somehow one of the feel-good hits of the fall: a freaky tale set in steampunk Victorian England about a woman’s corpse that is revived with a baby’s brain.
With his new film, Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos seems almost eager to discard whatever goodwill he’s built up. Poor Things was sexually explicit and occasionally gory, and featured plenty of seething villainy. But it was also a whimsical picaresque about a woman on a successful journey of self-empowerment, threading the needle between Lanthimos’s eccentricity and his sly populism. Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of stories starring the same ensemble of actors, is a sledgehammer to the face—a collection of musings on human selfishness and cruelty that feels like the return of Dogtooth Lanthimos. I enjoyed plenty of its nearly three-hour run time, suffered through other parts, and was practically praying for the credits by the end. Most of all, I salute Lanthimos for getting back to his freaky roots, only this time on American soil.
Kinds of Kindness is working with a familiar company of players from Lanthimos’s recent films—Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Joe Alwyn, and Margaret Qualley—and some reliable new faces such as Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie. But the biggest and wisest addition is Jesse Plemons, who has become one of the most versatile and exciting American actors of late, finding new angles on loneliness, awkwardness, and sublimated rage in movies such as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, The Power of the Dog, and Civil War. Here, he plays three variations of doofy brutes plunged into a menacing new nightmare, each time functioning as a perfect pincushion for Lanthimos’s experiments.
The first segment, “The Death of R.M.F.,” was easily my favorite—a sadistically funny, blacker-than-black comedy set in a world slightly askew from our own. (R.M.F. is a minor character who recurs in all three stories.) Plemons is Robert, a businessman who has been groomed for success by his boss, Raymond (Dafoe), a control freak who dictates all of Robert’s behavior to him every day, down to what he eats, whom he marries, and when he has sex. When Robert finally resists one of these edicts, Raymond withdraws from his life—which quickly unravels, with Lanthimos (and his co-writer, Efthimis Filippou) delighting in the jarring shift from rigidity to chaos.
Given the punishing length of Kinds of Kindness, I might have preferred to see a slightly extended version of “The Death of R.M.F.” as its own feature film, because it reminded me so much of Lanthimos favorites such as The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Those movies thrived on human absurdity, yet their characters spoke in a bored monotone, regarding the strange circumstances of their lives with resigned terror. That tone remained in Poor Things and 2018’s The Favourite but felt a little sanded down. It is back here, as Robert’s quiet protests are greeted with cool, patient disaffection by Raymond.
My interest was definitely stretched with every new segment, all of them running about 55 minutes each. The second installment, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” casts Plemons as Daniel, a cop whose wife, Liz (Stone), returns after going missing for a long time, then fuels his suspicions that she’s been replaced by some sort of doppelgänger. The resulting mystery is sporadically entertaining but a little drawn out, though Plemons plays Daniel’s nervy paranoia with frightening adeptness. In the final act, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Plemons and Stone are two members in a wellness cult seeking someone who can resurrect the dead. Although Lanthimos has a couple of hits to score on the silly aesthetics of hippie retreats, my patience was severely tested at this point. There isn’t enough variety to the misery, or variation in character, to justify segments that tend to amount to a clever but very extended joke.
In all three parts, Lanthimos’s characters crave control: over people, their environment, and life’s biggest questions. In pretty much every circumstance, the result of these cravings is torture, suffering, and death. Lanthimos’s diagnosis is that we are selfish bags of meat and water, bumping into one another in strange and often hurtful ways, and there’s nothing you can do but laugh at the ensuing mess. That’s a big ask for nearly three hours of moviegoing, though at least it’s never dull; Kinds of Kindness always remembers to toss in something shocking anytime things risk getting mundane. But as much as I admire Lanthimos’s penchant for punishing his characters and his audience, I hit my limit after a while.
