'Kinds of Kindness' review: A poor thing from Yorgos Lanthimos
Kinds of Kindness begins with the pulsing beat of Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." Hearing Annie Lennox and the sharpened notes of Dave Stewart's synth over the title sequence of the latest film of Yorgos Lanthimos is a reminder that the director has rarely moved quietly. After the crowd-pleasing opening, which caused my Cannes audience to clap in unison, Lanthimos surprisingly switches gears — and not for the better.
Kinds of Kindness features his heralded recent Poor Things collaborators, like Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, and Margaret Qualley, with new additions like the excellent Jesse Plemons and Hong Chau. However, it doesn't have the same spry spirit of his recent mainstream successes, like the Best Picture–nominated Poor Things, the royal sapphic comedy The Favourite, or even the Colin Farrell–fronted The Lobster.
A tryptic fable told over the span of 164 minutes, Kinds of Kindness is a prickly, dark offering that returns the Greek filmmaker to his unconventional roots, his older, spikier films like Kinetta and Dogtooth. It's a return, however, that doesn't wholly fit. Like a person trying on an old school uniform only to find it now feels unfamiliar, Kinds of Kindness — despite Plemons' best efforts — is a shaggy imitation of the director's previous era.
What's Kinds of Kindness about?
Reteaming with his Greek co-writer Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer), Lanthimos offers three short films whose stories are only thematically connected. His cast recurs across these shorts, playing different roles.
In the first absurdist story, "The Death of R.M.F.," Raymond (Dafoe) is a wealthy businessman who dispatches his groveling assistant Robert (Plemons) to purposely crash into the car of a specific stranger. This isn't the first time Raymond has ordered Robert to carry out a risky task for his own amusement. Raymond, in fact, handsomely compensates Robert by furnishing a lush lifestyle that includes his wife Sarah (Chau), a luxe home, a gleaming SUV, and other exorbitant gifts, like one of John McEnroe's smashed rackets. All Robert has to do is allow Raymond to control every aspect of his life. But when Robert he says "no" for the first time, his decision leads to dire consequences.
Part two, "R.M.F. Is Flying," is a mix of The Lobster and Gone Girl. This time, Plemons plays Daniel, a quiet cop whose wife has gone missing. But once she returns, he worries Liz (Stone) might be an imposter, leading to strange tests for his theory.
In part three, "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are a pair of investigators for a cult led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau). They are searching the country for a prophesied person with the ability to raise people from the dead. Their search will lead Emily back to the life she left behind, putting her standing in the cult in jeopardy.
In Kind of Kindness, Plemons proves he can't miss.
Through every section of Kinds of Kindness, you get the sense that none of this would work without Plemons. While this is the fourth collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone (The Favourite, Bleat, and Poor Things being the others), Plemons, surprisingly, has not previously worked with the Greek director.
As seen most recently in The Power of the Dog and Civil War, Plemons' uncanny ability to infuse leading-man gravitas into oddball characters brings a haunting and fragile energy to Kinds of Kindness. Plemons is a necessary addition. Each short begins with a burst of provocative energy, held together by Plemons making you believe that each seemingly disparate man he's playing is cut from the same cloth and is therefore worth getting to know. But despite his best efforts, each short eventually fizzles under the pressure of its own conceit.
The first section, arguably the strongest, remains fascinating because of Plemons. Once Lanthimos reveals the reality of Robert's situation — exactly how absurdly controlled his life under Raymond is — it's only Plemons' unmatched ability to play pitiful characters that keeps the audience engaged. His dedication makes for one of the film's best scenes, in which a desperate Robert employs a violent scheme to attract a woman's attention. The deadpan Plemons plays in these hapless scenes with aplomb, especially when Qualley comes into the picture, beguiled by his buffoonery.
The other sections, however, offer progressively diminishing returns. Plemons is subtler in "R.M.F. Is Flying," translating the psychological angst of a disquieted husband to give the paranoid narrative some type of heady propulsion. Of the three parts, "R.M.F. Is Flying" is also probably the bloodiest, wielding body horror as a kind of love language with a touching dexterity that eventually loses its thoughtfulness once the conceit runs to its logical conclusion.
Kinds of Kindness is mind-numbingly obvious.
On a thematic level, Lanthimos and Filippou are to the point: Each short is a type of kindness that leads to brutal results. There are some other key features: opulence, marriage, sex, and godlike figures. These arrive to unbalance the viewer. Lanthimos, particularly in his early work, is often most engaging when he is cutting the audience down to size, daring to elicit a(ny) response from them. In Kinetta, it was a group of people reenacting murders; in Dogtooth, there was incest; The Lobster opens with a woman coldly shooting a donkey. But in Kinds of Kindness, where every component exists on the surface, the entirety of the picture lacks a deeper register.
There is no soul underneath the flash. It's all pure spectacle. And maybe that is the point: the vapidity of the onscreen cannibalism, kidnapping, and sex matches how our contemporary society is often consumed by buzzy headlines, trending topics, viral videos, and unmitigated wealth. But those components, even when taken together, do not often add up to a satisfying whole — partly because Lanthimos doesn't lean on Plemons enough and, for the most part, eschews emotionality in favor of provocation. The latter decision isn't wholly surprising. Stoicism has always been a component of Lanthimos' films, from Colin Farrell's deadpan observations in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to Rachel Weisz's severe sensuality in The Favourite; he likes his actors to nimbly balance tones.
As such, a number of scenes — like when Sarah discovers that her husband Robert sterilized her at Raymond's bidding or when Emily is matter-of-factly waiting in line to have sex with a cult leader — walk the line between comedy and shock. But where once there was soulfulness beneath Lanthimos' antagonization, here, it's just titillation without any further thought or philosophy behind his restless prodding.
By the time we reach the third story, "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," the focus has shifted to Emma Stone. The Best Actress Oscar–winner portrays Emily as a keen observer torn between the love for the daughter she abandoned to join a cult and her loyalty to cult leader Omi (a lascivious Dafoe). While much of the film concerns the purity of acts, the third section takes that interest to the extreme. All the members of Omi's cult must have pure fluids in their body; they can't have sex with anyone but Omi and Aka. It's a doctrine that puts Emily in direct conflict with her ex-husband (Joe Alwyn). Still, in her purple Dodge Challenger, with the stoic Andrew (Plemons) by her side, she dutifully zips from town to town, into the morgues where Will (an underrated Mamoudou Athie) works, searching for a person capable of raising the dead.
Though Plemons and Stone have tremendous chemistry during the first two parts to Kinds of Kindness, their sizzle dwindles in the third section. It's frankly an odd turn of events. Throughout "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," it often feels like Stone is miscast. There is a mysteriousness to Emily, to her past and the parts of herself she keeps buried, that Stone struggles to tease out.
Such an unfocused performance is exhausting to endure, giving very little payoff to sit through the onscreen shock. Even when an underused Qualley emerges, an actress with a reputation for dynamism, particularly in Drive-Away Dolls, the pulse of the film doesn't return. Rather, Qualley's signature energy is undercut playing a character, who, like Plemons, purely exists on the periphery as an enigma.
Ultimately, Kinds of Kindness circles the drain as more of a thought experiment of the types of cruelty that can emerge in the universe. It's a film incapable of inciting the type of staggering, profoundly smart character-work involving doomed individuals that was the hallmark of Lanthimos' early work. Fans hoping to see a return to his formerly subversive voice will only find a poor thing.