Seven months after the Oscar-winning Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone return for Kinds of Kindness, a 165-minute anthology film telling three separate stories loosely connected through the figure of R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos). All three stories are named after him, and he appears in all segments, whether as a dead man (“The Death of R.M.F.”), a helicopter pilot (“R.M.F. is Flying.”), and the corpse of the first segment (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”), his thread is the only element that connects each short film to one another.
In addition to Emma Stone, who appears in all three shorts as Rita/Liz/Emily (that’s her real name), Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn round up the cast, playing characters who couldn’t be more different than each other in each segment. For the first time since 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and after veering off on more crowd-pleasing, accessible fare (though always keeping that off-kilter edge) with The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos reunites with his screenwriting partner Efthimis Filippou, who has collaborated with the filmmaker since 2009’s Dogtooth, which garnered the two international recognition.
If anything, Kinds of Kindness acts as the anti-Poor Things, a movie that never aims to please, and goes so far as to insult the audience’s patience with three segments that go virtually nowhere, where the spectators are the butt of the joke of a film that seems to want to talk about human challenges but doesn’t really do much with the moral challenge Robert (Jesse Plemons) has to face in “The Death of R.M.F.,” how Daniel (Plemons) questions his own humanity in “R.M.F. is Flying,” and the spiritual connection of Emily’s (Stone) body via a cult that eerily resembles Scientology in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.”
The latter short may be the strongest of the three in terms of narrative involvement, as it introduces spiritually-charged characters through Hunter Schafer’s Anna and Margaret Qualley’s Ruth, candidates who may have the key to reviving the dead. In that conceit, Emily and Andrew (Plemons) are revealed to be members of a cult, where the two routinely have sex with its leader, Omi (Dafoe), whilst he and his wife’s (Hong Chau) tears ‘purify’ the water, and a sauna is used to ‘de-contaminate’ the body (taking a page right out of L. Ron Hubbard’s insane Clear Body, Clear Mind: The Effective Purification Program).
Jerskin Fendrix’s usually piano-heavy score (honestly sounding like someone is just banging keys without purpose, but in turn disassociates the sonic atmosphere from the leads’ stilted, unnaturally surreal performances) turns into choir anthems as we see how the cult operates, yet Lanthimos and Filippou are never going to hand-hold the audience when focusing on the characters. Something happened between Emily and her husband, Joseph (Joe Alwyn), that led her into Omi’s cult, but little of it is actively explored. Instead of understanding a deeper connection with the otherworldly, Emily dances to COBRAH’s “Brand New Bitch,” as a victory moment to be welcomed back into the cult until a morbid shift into dark humor will ensure she will never get anything out of it. Characters instead go through jarring shifts in tone, recessing instead of progressing within the experiences they share in each story Lanthimos and Filippou present on the screen.
This is more evident in the second short, “R.M.F. is Flying,” where Daniel suspects his missing wife, Liz (Stone), of not being who she said she was. After being found on a deserted island, Liz returns home, begins craving a cigarette, and suddenly enjoys chocolate, which Daniel and his best friend, Neil (Athie), have pointed out how much she hates it as they are eating dinner. This segment goes in a specific direction that questions Daniel’s connection with Liz but takes a much darker, if not incredibly surprising turn, as an innate desire for human’s most primal need for survival. This results in an increasingly violent segment that makes its sole protagonist a lesser human than he was as an upstanding police officer by the time he was introduced in the segment.
And how about the first short? Interestingly enough, “The Death of R.M.F.” is more attuned to Quentin Dupieux’s style of absurdist black comedies than full-fledged Lanthimos (which he returns to in the second and third segments), with Robert’s boss, Raymond (Dafoe), repeating ad nauseam lines and situations that are honestly terribly irritating to watch occur and are only designed to piss off as many people as possible (yes, there were walkouts at my screening when some audience members realized that the film is going absolutely nowhere). Yet, and if done right, this type of humor is very much in my ballpark, one that’s so subtle it’ll frustrate people who can’t grasp the basis of second-degree, while the ones who see what Lanthimos and Filippou are doing are laughing their socks off.
It’s probably why I think Kinds of Kindness is Lanthimos’ funniest film. Even if its characters become far more despicable than they were in their in media res introductions, and the stories Lanthimos and Filippou treat on screen go around in circles (only Robbie Ryan’s 35mm CinemaScope photography gives us compelling images to attach ourselves and make us pay attention to how he plays with the three-dimensionality of a liminal space), the humor is so attuned to how we perceive comedy that your mileage may vary on your willingness to endure second-degree for 165 minutes.
If you’re having difficulty discerning what the film is about, here’s one thing I can tell you that could enhance your viewing experience (actually two). First, look at how Ryan positions the camera within the confines of the spaces in which Lanthimos traps his characters. There are many clues to how the visual (and aural, with Fendrix distorting his piano sounds as he beats it to death) world of Kinds of Kindness isn’t at all in sync with how the lead stars approach their characters. Second, look at how each actor portrays the protagonists they are tasked to bring to life in each of the shorts. There are no opposing forces – each protagonist is a terrible human who will ultimately regress from their present-day condition by the time the segments end. The only character who does not change is “R.M.F.,” the connector of each story.
With that in mind, look at how each actor approaches their protagonists within the shorts. Plemons is the most impressive of the bunch, showcasing his versatility at playing three different sleazeballs with distinct tonalities, physicalities (and hairdos), while Stone continues to do career-best work with Lanthimos, always pushing her on new territories she previously didn’t explore with other filmmakers (which is probably why she likes to work with him so much). Dafoe and Chau are equally as good, with the latter impressing particularly in the third segment, as a fully-radicalized member of Omi’s cult, while the former character is more posed (but equally controlling) in his actions within it. It’s quite terrifying to watch unfold.
Watching the film, it’s unsurprising that Plemons won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival, delivering a performance that we thought he could do but was never able to showcase until now. The shifts all of his characters undertake within the stories he’s a part of (and the shifts they undertake inside the stories) are some of the best micro-expressions I’ve seen realized on screen from an actor who will likely be studied in film schools for generations to come. No, literally, what he does here is transcendental and once-in-a-generation. Regardless of his future collaboration with Lanthimos in Bugonia (also starring Stone), what he achieves with only his disconnected face creates a new language in microphysiognomy that none of its theorists thought possible when they introduced the concept to the world.
These elements make Kinds of Kindness such a unique project in Lanthimos’ oeuvre, and perhaps his most electrifying in its provocative (dark) humor and regressive protagonists. It doesn’t ask any pertinent questions about humanity’s nature, but it also doesn’t care. It’s here to make no statement, but it may make you think for a bit until you realize that you’re the butt of the joke and have been played by one of the world’s most revered filmmakers. That may be his biggest coup-de-grâce, and Quentin Dupieux is probably dizzy with excite right now.
Kinds of Kindness is now playing in theatres.
