Sado-Masochism Rules in 'Kinds of Kindness'
The new film from 'Poor Things' director Yorgos Lanthimos is confounding, if not unpleasant.
Kinds of Kindness is the confounding, albeit not unpleasant, new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos is probably best known to the general public for his Oscar-winning mainstream hits, The Favourite and Poor Things, both of which were written by Tony McNamara; Kinds of Kindness, however, reunites the auteur with Efthimis Filippou, who wrote Lanthimos’ more esoteric films - specifically, Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer - and is much more in line with those movies. Although it actually may be even more strange. Which is saying something.
Kinds of Kindness contains three consecutive stories (thus its logo), each united only by recurring themes and cast members. One minor character, known only as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), appears in each chapter, both physically and in the section’s title, but otherwise the actors play different roles every time (and even R.M.F. seems to exist outside the laws of strict continuity).
In the first story, "The Death of R.M.F," Jesse Plemons (Civil War) plays a guy whose boss, the great Willem Dafoe, has control over every aspect of his life, including who he can marry, when he can have sex, whether or not he can father children, and even when he must get into a major traffic accident; furthermore, he often makes Plemons do these things multiple times with various adjustments, like a director calling for another take. Hong Chau (The Whale) plays Plemons’ wife; Margaret Qualley (Sanctuary) plays Dafoe’s wife; Emma Stone shows up as another of Dafoe’s devout employees; Joe Alwyn (Mary Queen of Scotts) plays an appraiser of sports memorabilia; and Mamoudou Athie (Patti Cake$) plays Chau’s co-worker.
In the second segment, "R.M.F. is Flying," Plemons plays a cop married to Stone, has just returned home after being stranded in a shipwreck; Plemons then comes to suspect this woman is not his wife, but an imposter. Dafoe plays Stone’s father; Chau plays the wife of the shipwreck’s only other survivor; Alwyn plays a random dude who has a bad run-in with Plemons; Athie plays Plemons’ partner and best friend; and Qualley plays Athie’s wife.
In the final segment, "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," Stone and Plemons are cult members searching for a prophesied holy woman who can allegedly raise the dead. The cult leaders, who keep a pool of their tears for their followers to drink, are portrayed by Dafoe and Chau; Athie is a coroner who gets the cult access to dead bodies whenever it thinks it’s found “the one”; Alwyn is Stone’s estranged spouse, who is not part of the cult; and Qualley plays twin sisters, one of whom may or may not be the messianic figure in question.
The most obvious thematic overlap between the three parts is the subject of dominance, which has long been one of Lanthimos’ clearest interests: every segment includes character dynamics in which one person is forced to follow bizarrely strict sets of rules (the movie might have been called Kinds of Sado-Masochism) - in fact, they often seem desperate to do so, regardless of how ridiculous those rules may be. Not for nothing does the film prominently include the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” with its iconic lyrics about manipulation and subjugation:
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
But the film also repeatedly deals with weight/food, sex, and vehicular homicide, amongst other issues. In addition to the character designated as R.M.F., there’s also an abundance of other characters with the same, or similar, initials. One might also note that while Chau plays characters named Sarah and Sharon and Alwyn plays characters named Jerry and Joseph, no one else in the cast ever play roles with the same first letter. A character who is roofied and assaulted in one scene then roofies and assaults someone else; actually, come to think of it, I think a few characters get roofied in this flick.
What does any of this “mean”? I honestly have no clue. Everything here, from the uptight, overly formal dialogue to the myriad of bizarre plot points, unfolds via a sort of impenetrable dream logic. I kept waiting for an “Ah-HA!” moment, some sort of scene that ties the whole piece together, but it never arrived; personal interpretation is the name of the game of here.
The opaqueness of Kinds of Kindness may challenge your patience (the movie is nearly three hours long). But it still looks great (the cinematography is Robby Ryan, who also shot Poor Things and The Favourite), and Lanthimos remains a top-flight director of surrealist comedy that’s just a tad mean-spirited (the last story, for example, ends with an uproariously cruel twist of fate that calls to mind certain Twilight Zone episodes). You may not completely understand why the hell anything that happens is happening, but you will likely laugh quite a bit, and you certainly won’t ever be bored. Kinds of Kindness feels a bit like Harold Pinter by way of Hal Ashby.
The cast is also terrific… although anyone hoping that playing multiple roles would allow the actors to really show off their far-reaching range, à la Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove or Tilda Swinton in the Suspiria remake, may be disappointed. Plemons, who won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, probably comes closest, but even he never really gets a chance to strut.
Look: I’m not opposed to films that leave the audience feeling somewhat perplexed, but Kinds of Kindness does feel like it’s missing… something. Perhaps the highest compliment I can Lanthimos’ latest is that I’m eager to see it again so I can try and figure out what that something is.