Kinds of Kindness (2024 | Ireland, UK, US | 164 minutes | Yorgos Lanthimos)
My first reaction to Yorgos Lanthimos’s new absurdist black comedy anthology was that it was nice to see him getting weird again. As if his recent filmography about an insecure queen in a room full of rabbits and lesbian intrigue (The Favourite) or a fable about Frankenstein Barbie discovering her autonomy through sex work (Poor Things) were somehow stodgy exercises in storytelling. What I suspect is being this response as being a return to form is that while those movies minted Best Actress Oscar statues for their stars (Olivia Colman and Emma Stone, respectively), they were set in faraway times with fantasy elements with screenplays by Australian playwright Tony McNamara. With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos partners again with his fellow Greek Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deer) where the action is set in the present day, with seemingly ordinary people, and nowhere to turn but the dark heart of humanity to explain the dark supernatural undercurrents haunting its protagonists. In many ways, that’s so much more unsettling.
The film is a triptych of sadness. Although the same cast recurs across each story, they play different characters and the stories are unlinked beyond a general sense of explorations of control and belief. The first (“The Death of R.M.F.”) finds Jesse Plemmons as some sort of unspecified mid-level executive whose daily routine — from morning meals to evening fornication — is prescribed on handwritten notecards by a controlling boss played with chilly confidence by Willem Dafoe. Following his instructions to a tee has given him a comfortable life, a loving wife (Hong Chau), and a whole lot of amusing high end sports memorabilia. Plemmons dry affect yet ability to convey intensely unsettling undercurrents makes him a perfect addition to the Lantimos-verse. Only when he fails in following one particularly violent instruction do we see the breadth of Dafoe’s control over his world and the intense longing that spirals toward madness when he’s cut loose from a routine of extreme submission to fend for himself.
The next (“R.M.F. is Flying”) — the shortest of the three — opens with Plemmons as a sad sack police officer whose days are spent in a perilous suspension between grief and hope over the fate of a wife who’d gone missing at sea while studying coral reefs. His primary social support is his best friend, law enforcement partner, and occasional swinging buddy (Mamoudou Athie). When his beloved wife (Emma Stone) is miraculously returned to him, he refuses to believe she’s actually the woman he married. What follows is either some sort of breakdown or another test of devotion. Infused with eerie horror elements, both Plemmons and Stone portray a couple stubbornly struggling to understand each other. As the stakes escalate, it becomes a ghastly stand-off of the lengths you’ll go to to prove yourself right and a test of whether it’s worth it to find out.
In the third piece (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”), the dramatic weight shifts to Stone. She and Plemmons play a pair of spiritual investigators of sorts, racing around the exurban Louisiana coast in a capricious grape-colored Dodge Challenger in search of a messiah. Members of a purity-obsessed waterfront sex cult led by Dafoe (in tattooed mascara, flowing pink shirts, and speedos) and Chau (as an earthy counterpart to his flamoyance), they’re on a quest to find a woman who fulfills the very specific constraints of prophesy with the power to raise the dead. Staying in budget hotels and drinking only the tear-infused drinking water carried from the compound. Outside the gates, amid the bizarre measurements and tests of their candidates, Stone’s character feels the draw of her previous life: a young daughter and husband whose lives have continued on in her absence. It’s in negotiating these two urges that the film finds perhaps its darkest elements, culminating agin in flavors of despair and cruel twists of fate.
I’m admittedly biased against short films and by the third act the format and running time started working against my enjoyment of the project. My best compliment and harshest criticism is that I think that while each are very worthy of attention, I suspect that I’ve had enjoyed a full length version of any of them more than the collection of all three. With that said, each film is infused with dry awkward humor, moments so uncomfortable that having an audience to laugh alongside will bring some kind of relief to the viewing experience. That they’re set in a realist mode, with the uncomfortably matter-of-fact delivery of dry devotees so common in Lanthimos’s work, makes them all the more unsettling. They’re united in a way by an original score by Jerskin Fendrix, whose discordant yet triumphal work on Poor Things sounds downright lush in comparison to the intrusive spare piano percussions and choral repetitions at play here. Linked only beyond a repertory recurring cast, the three films find the actors stretching their skills and collectively interrogating cultish submission and the consequences of straying, no matter how inexplicable or absurd.
After premiering at Cannes and a limited theatrical release, Kinds of Kindness arrives in Seattle theaters on June 28.
Images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.