Kinds of Kindness

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is on a bit of a roll. His previous two films (The Favourite and Poor Things) came out five years apart due to the interruption of COVID-19, but both received a glowing reception from critics and audiences alike. They made many year end best of lists and critics' awards, including nabbing a combined twenty-one Oscars nominations and winning five. And they were quite widely seen by the public, comfortably turning a profit. Yorgos, the guy who made a movie in which a man turns into a lobster, whose breakthrough film involves the upsetting breaking of cultural taboos and crafting a disturbing reality in which words literally lose their meaning, has gone mainstream. His recent movies are still weird, but they're digestible weird. Making this the perfect moment to stick his thumb in everyone's eye.

Kinds of Kindness isn't a full retreat from good taste, but it is cut from the same cloth as The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Which is fitting as it's his return to working with long time writing partner Efthimis Filippou, with whom he wrote that earlier film. The whole thing is very low key, infused with a sense of dread from beginning to end, and mildly surreal in ways that make almost everything we see perfectly conceivable. It's funny, but using quiet little bits and irony and absurdism and awkward, stilted dialog, as well as a bunch of perfect visual gags and editing jokes. Ultimately, it leaves you wondering what the point was of what you just watched, although the longer you let it sit with you the clearer the goal becomes, even as it may not change whether or not it worked on you.

Adding to the movie's strangeness amongst the American theatrical film landscape is its structure. It's an anthology film, consisting of three stories with no narrative connection. Only the core actors stay the same: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn. Although they play different characters in name and station and even appearance, they seem to inhabit similar roles: Plemons and Stone the leads, Dafoe the authority figure, Chau the supportive wife, with Qualley and Athie and Alwyn serving as colorful ways of pushing the story forward. Yorgos Stefanakos is the sole exception, playing R.M.F. across all three segments, whose name and actions give each their title: "The Death of R.M.F.", "R.M.F. is Flying", and "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich". Ironically, R.M.F. is not a major part of any of the plots, although his character is central to all of them in a muted sort of way.

Primarily, the three stories are explorations of humanity under duress, playing out in a reality that is almost the same as ours, but never quite feels like the real world, be it due to character behavior or some surreal element or both. Each focuses in on the drive for connection and acceptance, the desperation of proving you're deserving of love, and the fuzzy line between "tough love" and "emotional abuse". "The Death of R.M.F." and "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich" most clearly fit; the former concerns Plemons' trying to reconstruct his disintegrating life after standing up to his boss and being fired, while the latter follows Stone and Plemons as cult members trying to find a woman they believe able to raise the dead. In "R.M.F. is Flying", it's our protagonist Daniel (Plemons) putting his wife through various tests of devotion. Each is approached with a mixture of quiet, profound terror and twisted comedy, more likely to make you chuckle out of discomfort or surprise than laugh hysterically.

The whole thing is chock full of insignificant little details which greatly heighten the enjoyment: Plemons' room full of absurd collectibles, the perfect use of a hard cut to reveal a nostalgic home movie, Stone tearing around town in a Dodge Challenger like she's in Drive, and more. Even some of the structural elements play with us. He lists the character credits at the end of each segment, then hard cuts to the beginning of the next with no warning, as if trying to make them feel more of a piece than they truly are. The sole exception is in the final segment, where after that mini-credits drop over Stone doing a wonderfully unhinged dance to "Brand New Bitch" by Cobrah, we get one more crucial (and truly hilarious) scene, followed by an epilogue under the full credits which may as well be a tribute to The Avengers.

I'm not expecting this to make the same splash as his previous two hits. Despite fresh storytelling and excellent performances from everyone (with Plemons the standout), it's just such a big ask. You've got to sit through three disconnected stories running a bit over fifty minutes each on average (before credits), so as soon as you've settled in, the story is over, and you've got to reset with barely a moment to collect yourself. Granted, Yorgos is counting on that, trying to use it to carry narrative momentum and keep at top of mind the ideas from each previous installment, but it ends up somewhat disorienting. With a faint thematic throughline, it comes off as if he just had three ideas he fell in love with but didn't think were deserving of the theatrical length treatment. But rather than go the streaming route as Wes Anderson did last year, he strung them together to ensure that viewers gave them all the attention they deserve.

And they do deserve your attention. Muted as they are, they contain all the creativity and boldness that has been Yorgos' hallmark for his entire twenty plus year career. Which alone makes it far more worth your money and time than eighty percent of theatrical releases, and ninety-five percent of streaming originals.