Robert is a New Orleans businessman so devoted to his boss that he allows him to control every detail of his schedule down to the minute, from what time he goes to bed at night to what time he makes love to his wife in the morning. Daniel is a police officer who becomes suspicious of his wife after she returns to him from being lost at sea; convinced that she’s been replaced by an impostor, he asks the supposed doppelgänger to commit increasingly demented acts of self-harm as a test of her love. Andrew is a loyal cultist whose leaders instruct him to scour the bayou area in search of a prophesied girl with the power to heal the dead.
On paper, these characters may not seem to have much in common. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness,” however, the echoes that reverberate between them eventually grow so loud that it becomes almost impossible not to think of them as a single man who gets reshuffled into a trio of different circumstances, haircuts, and psychosexual dependencies.
It helps, of course, that all of them are played by Jesse Plemons. But the deeper resonance can only be explained by Lanthimos’ career-long fascination with the shared perversities of human nature — chief among them being our desperate need for love and acceptance, a desire powerful enough to warp the basic fabric of reality around the people who fulfill it in one another. While there isn’t any literal overlap between the trio of stories that Lanthimos tells here, the anthology format allows the “Alps” director to adopt a helpfully prismatic approach towards his usual obsessions; it’s never been easier to appreciate how Lanthimos’ films achieve their singularly disturbed kick by warping our most universal emotions through the infinity mirror of fucked up things we do to keep them in check. And thank God for that, because it’s never been harder to appreciate one of his films on virtually any other level.
Shot “on a budget” during the long post-production process for Lanthimos’ extravagant, Oscar-winning “Poor Things,” the happily inhospitable “Kinds of Kindness” can’t help but feel like an allergic reaction to the mainstream success he’s enjoyed — or at least capitalized upon — since pivoting from Greek to English with “The Lobster” in 2015. Always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both smothered and excessive at the same time (and at all times), this nearly three-hour bonfire of Searchlight Pictures’ annual budget is a towering monument to human love that betrays almost zero interest in actually being liked.
If anything, “Kinds of Kindness” finds a tickle of sadistic pleasure in setting audiences up for a fall, as its opening titles — soundtracked by Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” (Are Made of This)” at full blast — offer the empty promise of a propulsive art-pop spectacle. Not so fast. Apt as some of the song’s lyrics might be for the stories that follow (everybody’s looking for something, and who are we to disagree with what they find?), that needle drop soon proves to be the most propulsive moment this movie has to offer, as the action immediately downshifts into an even lower and more airless register than any of Lanthimos’ previous collaborations with co-writer Efthimis Filippou (e.g. “Dogtooth,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”).
The first episode is dubbed “The Death of R.M.F.,” and it does a fine job of anticipating how “Kinds of Kindness” will marry Lanthimos’ favorite Hollywood actors with the unsmiling hostility of the movies he made before he met them (as opposed to, say, the prestige cheek on display in “The Favourite”). Who is R.M.F.? A guy who’s going to die. And why is he going to die? Because a business mogul named Raymond (Willem Dafoe, even scarier in his sweetness) has instructed Robert — his most beloved employee — to make him a victim of vehicular manslaughter. It’s possible there’s a practical reason behind that directive, but anyone familiar with Lanthimos’ work should know better than to expect an explanation. His films are governed by a series of rules that are as arcane as they are strictly enforced, and his characters violate those rules at their own peril.
The ones we meet here are played by a wide variety of familiar faces, almost all of whom are recast in different roles for each of the three stories in this film; the effect serves to underscore the inescapability of human nature, which is as unyielding as a car crash, and as infinitely mutable as the possible combinations between the seven billion people on our planet. In “The Death of R.M.F.,” Margaret Qualley plays Raymond’s curiously young moll of a wife (her purple chiffon robe adding a splash of color to an antiseptic vision of America where every dash of life feels like a foreign accent), Lanthimos newcomer Hong Chau fits right in as Robert’s spouse, “The Favourite” actor Joe Alwyn shows up for a real “Is that Joe Alwyn?” moment, and Emma Stone — the director’s recent muse — eventually arrives on the scene as a back-up plan after Robert begins to blanch at his boss’ orders.
Robert thinks he wants the freedom to make his own choices in life, only to discover that the freedom from choice can be a gift in its own right. “The Death of R.M.F.” isn’t particularly suspenseful, exciting, or funny (though a recurring bit about sports memorabilia is a great encapsulation of Lanthimos’ dry wit), but the story is sustained by the hypnotic uneasiness it finds in the disconnect between the sinisterness of Raymond’s whole deal and the sincerity of the bond it creates between he and Robert.
If the titles of the movie’s three chapters are unhelpful nonsense, the title of the movie itself proves to be plenty instructive: Each segment explores a very different kind of kindness, all of which seem like forms of cruelty until a shift in perspective reveals they come from a better place. Naturally, that has a way of making these people seem even more fucked up in the end, but — as is often the case with Lanthimos’ characters — their violent foibles serve to remind us that our desperate need for love and acceptance is simply too feral to follow a one-size-fits-all template.
For all of its stifling brutality, “The Death of R.M.F.” might as well be a Nancy Meyers movie compared to the bleakness that follows. After the first of the three end credits sequences that Lanthimos uses to wipe the slate clean with each new story, “R.M.F. Is Flying” begins by recasting Plemons as Daniel the laconic cop, and Stone as Liz the missing wife. And yet, there’s no denying that we’re still watching the same film. Robbie Ryan’s clinically flat cinematography establishes a visual coherence that makes all of the characters look like lab rats, while Jerskin Fendrix’s spare musical accompaniment allows “Kinds of Kindness” to maintain the same torpid rhythm from start to finish (there’s a lot of chanting).
In this middle chapter, he adds a plunky, “Eyes Wide Shut”-like piano to the score in a bid to forefront the marital suspicion that roils beneath each scene after Liz is rescued from sea and returns home so vivacious and eager to please that it seems plausible she was bodysnatched by an alien. As ever, Lanthimos finds comedy in the lizard brain animalia of human horniness; a brief, sex-related sight gag in “R.M.F. Is Flying” isn’t just one of the funniest things he’s ever done, it’s also a laugh-out-loud moment so effective that it makes you realize the full extent to which the other 167 minutes of this movie are holding back, Lanthimos’ latest comedy embodying an expressionless that used to be reserved for his characters.
This segment also stands out for its swan dive into absurdist body horror, and for how its blood-letting allows Plemons to swim around in the dead-eyed sociopathy that he wields with the sort of seductive charm that other, less interesting movie stars can only achieve with their smile. Even in its most exasperating moments, of which there are many, “Kinds of Kindness” is a towering monument to Plemons’ talent; it’s enduring proof that he has a wider range between “desperation” and “depravity” alone than most actors do across the entire spectrum of human emotion. Stone’s eagerness and force of will make her a perfect foil for Plemons three times over (just as Mamoudou Athie’s softness helps to provide the movie’s fucked up fable of a middle chapter with the texture it needs), and their chemistry is another crucial bit of connective tissue between the seemingly discrete segments of a movie that only works because it adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Sex, twins, and food are some of the other motifs that spill into every corner of “Kinds of Kindness,” all of them pooling together in a final segment that’s fittingly dubbed “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” This time, Plemons takes a secondary role to Stone, who’s suddenly stylized to look like Shiv Roy; Andrew is a cultist so devoted to Dafoe and Chau that he only drinks from a giant container of their dirty bathwater (no judgments here), while his work partner and fellow proselytizer Emily risks her status in the religious group by holding onto some important relationships from her secular life.
Screeching around the shoreline in a purple Dodge Challenger, these uneasy coworkers are tasked with finding a young woman with magic powers, a quest that sees them crossing paths with one Hunter Schaefer and two Margaret Qualleys in between aggressively distressing bouts of sexual assault and animal cruelty. And yet, for all of that awfulness, it’s a sustained, consensual, and extremely close shot of two characters making out that best epitomizes Lanthimos’ slow-boiling frog-in-a-pot approach to the stuff in this movie, as each story is more disturbing than the one before it; by the time we get to “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” people can’t even show their affection in normal ways without making you want to crawl out of your skin.
That vague trajectory of steadily increasing vileness offers “Kinds of Kindness” with the closest thing that it has to momentum, though anyone holding their breath for a grand catharsis that might tie everything together is in for a harsh reality check, as Lanthimos continues to frustrate the fun right out of this film all the way through its dying moments. To be more specific without spoiling anything: The movie abruptly ends in the middle of its most high-energy moment since the opening credits, only to follow that with a mid-credits coda that acts as a morbid, semi-trollish punchline to everything you’ve sat through for the past three hours.
And yet, I hesitate to think that “Kinds of Kindness” is quite as spiteful as it seems. Lanthimos isn’t giving the finger to his fans just because he’s aggressively forsaking his own need for acceptance. For one thing, that hostility is part of the reason why so many people liked his work in the first place. For another, “Kinds of Kindness” would have failed to embody the courage of its convictions if not for its willingness to risk alienating those in its wheelhouse — to push them to the outer limits of their displeasure, only to realize that the relentless inertia of Lanthimos’ longest movie is an expression of his love for anyone willing to sit through it. After all, what relationship is more codependent, or more abidingly beautiful, than that between an artist and their audience?
Grade: B
“Kinds of Kindness” premiered in Competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, June 21.
