The excellence of Poor Things wasn’t a surprise, but the crowd-pleasing nature of it was, given that Yorgos Lanthimos had spent most of his career crafting bizarre, angular pictures which proved alienating to any mainstream audiences who stumbled upon them. (No movie I’ve recommended has induced more aggrieved “Why did you make me see that?!” responses than The Lobster.) If you hoped or feared that the one-two Oscar-nominated punch of The Favourite and Poor Things heralded a populist shift in Lanthimos’ trajectory, Kinds of Kindness has arrived to either disappoint or reassure you. Regardless of your take on Lanthimos—and in this critic’s view, he is one of the most inventive and skillful directors working today—you cannot deny that his latest movie represents a return (reversion?) to his typical, twisted form.
This isn’t to say that he’s repeating himself. Sure, the usual indicia of a Lanthimos production are on display: an absurdist tone, staccato dialogue, spasmodic violence, choose-your-own-adventure metaphors. Instead, the chief departure here is structural. Kinds of Kindness is an anthology picture, telling three separate stories which, at least in dramatic terms, are wholly distinct from one another. But because the segments all feature the same central cast—a who’s-who of talented American actors comprising (deep breath) Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie—and because their titles all mention the same acronymic figure (a bearded fellow called R.M.F., played wordlessly by Yorgos Stefanakos), they naturally invite speculation as to their thematic commonalities.
Which are of questionable value. I trust that more intelligent and industrious writers will parse Lanthimos’ allegory and weave from it a tapestry of thought-provoking ideas. For my part, the only readily apparent topic that threads these three episodes together is the pervasive and recursive nature of abuse. A man humiliates himself to please his boss, a woman chops off a finger to sate her husband, a cult member pleads for reenlistment after having been “contaminated”—these are the behaviors of helpless sheep in the thrall of predatory wolves. It isn’t as though Lanthimos is shaming his victims—despite its strangeness, his work retains a noble undercurrent of sympathy for his wretched souls—but he depicts their plight with disturbing extremity. The title is obviously a bitter joke; a more accurate label might be “modes of meanness.”
The competition for meanest motherfucker in the movie is fierce, but perhaps the scariest such character, who appears in the film’s first chapter (“The Death of R.M.F.”), never even raises his voice. That would be Raymond (Dafoe), a smiling executive who seems like a perfectly nice guy but who nevertheless demands unending fealty from his staffers. The full degree of control that Raymond wields over Robert (Plemons), a middle manager in his employ, is revealed only gradually; still, we gain an early inkling that something is up during a meeting in Raymond’s handsomely appointed office, when he casually asks Robert if he made love to his wife that morning. (“Yes, at 8:30, after I finished my breakfast.”) So when their conversation turns to murder, it feels less like the discussion of a criminal enterprise than the simple delegation of a work-related task.
Robert, for reasons that might seem valid to a normal person (to be clear, no such figure exists in a Yorgos Lanthimos picture), initially resists his assignment of killing a man, and the bedlam that ensues functions as a satire of the imbalance inherent in employer-employee relationships. Robert’s defiance displeases Raymond, whose wrath is swift, silent, and total; within days, Robert’s wife (played by Chau) has disappeared, his house has been looted, and his sense of purpose has evaporated. Devastated, Robert goes on something of a crime spree, engaging in burglary, assault, kidnapping, and a decisive piece of vehicular homicide—all in the frantic attempt to restore himself to Raymond’s good graces.
Is this profound? Maybe not. But it is engaging, imaginative, and most of all very funny. Plemons, outfitted with a thick red mustache and tight lavender turtleneck, imbues Robert with a sweaty desperation that lends credibility to his most outrageous acts, such as breaking into a house to recover a precious, pitiful artifact. (His trick of injuring himself in order to gain a woman’s sympathy will remind viewers of Ben Whishaw’s similar maneuver in The Lobster.) Lanthimos, with spiky editing and sharp imagery (shots of Stone in a cocktail dress and heels don’t hurt), keeps you both off balance and on edge, compelling you to hunch forward as he turns a laborer’s purported duty of loyalty into a ghastly perversion.
“R.M.F. Is Flying,” Kinds of Kindness’ middle installment, is no less demented, but it is considerably less enjoyable. Ditching the facial hair and sweater for a clean shave and a cop’s uniform, Plemons plays Daniel, an unhinged police officer whose wife, Liz (Stone), has just been rescued from a stint on a deserted island. What initially appears to be cause for celebration quickly curdles into suspicion, as Daniel wonders whether his returning beloved is actually an impostor. The evidence for his theory seems hard to deny: Their normally docile cat hisses at Liz, she gorges on chocolate even though she’s always found it distasteful, and she exhibits an aggressiveness in the bedroom that conflicts with her typically submissive tastes. What’s going on here?
A whole lot, and none of it is pretty. (Actually, I take that back: Lanthimos does deliver a few black-and-white flashback images of the marooned Liz—devouring a piece of meat, masturbating against a tree—that, while inexplicable, are also oddly beautiful.) As Daniel’s behavior grows increasingly erratic—he maims a passenger during a traffic stop, then develops an appetite for a particular type of flesh—Liz mysteriously alters her personality from liberated to servile. Before long, their once-happy home becomes a palace of cruelty, despair, and bloodshed.
This is designed to be shocking, but for once Lanthimos’ penchant for absurdity gets the better of him. Whether “R.M.F. Is Flying” is a study of marital instability or a portrait of mental disintegration, it’s too detached from emotional reality to work as either black comedy or domestic horror. Lanthimos previously dabbled in metaphorical terror with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but that movie succeeded because its nightmarish premise was tethered to thoughtfully developed characters. Here, the pitiful creatures on screen are too thinly conceived to earn our investment, and the resulting tone is less upsetting than merely unpleasant.
It’s a relief when “R.M.F. Is Flying” concludes, at which point Kinds of Kindness transitions to its third and best episode (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”). The events it chronicles remain bizarre—they include sudden suicides, potential resurrections, and licked stomachs—but they are rooted in a heroine who is recognizably human. That would be Emily (Stone), who along with her partner (Plemons, now sporting glasses and a buzz cut) is scouring the suburbs for a messianic figure. They search for this elusive identical twin at the behest of a married couple (Dafoe and Chau) who lord over a pastoral estate that contains a sweat lodge and a tear-filled fountain, along with a bedroom where any two random inhabitants invariably participate in enthusiastic coupling.
In her obsessive drive (sometimes literally, as she speeds through the streets in a midnight-purple Dodge Challenger), Emily mirrors Robert’s mania and Daniel’s paranoia. But she also possesses a choked longing independent from her mission, and which emerges when she visits her young daughter and her estranged husband (Joe Alwyn, who has single scenes in the other two chapters). What happens to her there is monstrous, but it also galvanizes her, leading to the movie’s most energetic stretch involving a wounded dog, an unusually gifted veterinarian (Qualley), and a chillingly empty swimming pool.
For all its lunacy, the narrative of “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” makes internal sense, even if it’s also subordinate to Emily’s emotional journey. Stone, largely a supporting player in the prior segments, reminds you of her talent here, showing how the character’s desire and shame mingle into a crazed determination. The moment when she dances wildly to a pop hit represents Lanthimos operating at his apex: ridiculous, kinetic, ecstatic.
But what of Kinds of Kindness as a whole? It’s difficult to say that the movie amounts to more than the sum of its parts, especially when one of those parts is so unsavory. Yet even if Lanthimos’ writing can be uneven (he co-penned the screenplay with Efthimis Filippou), his visual verve remains on point, and his filmmaking still seethes with welcome originality. On balance, this is his least satisfying picture in some time. But it’s still kind of awesome.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.