Kinds of Kindness
There are varying degrees to which a person might enjoy a Yorgos Lanthimos film. His new one, Kinds of Kindness, will either enrich or waste almost three hours of your life, depending on your personal Lanthimos tolerance. To help, I’ve created a quick test.
How’d you do? If your journey was full of ‘yes’, congratulations! See the film and come back for a read later. If you fell out of the tree somewhere in the middle, you may be swayable – read on. And if you tapped out early (or have never seen a Yorgos Lanthimos film in your life), you may still want to know what your more cinematically adventurous colleagues are talking about. Continue.
Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his misanthropic, absurdist, experimental form with the new black comedy Kinds of Kindness, a triptych fable that is sure to please his most accepting fans and lose him the trust of wider audiences lulled into a false sense of security after his last two aesthetic Tony McNamara collabs, Poor Things and The Favourite. The film’s screenplay is co-written by fellow Greek and frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, who worked on Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. And if Lanthimos’ partnership with Australian screenwriter McNamara showed the world his more palatable side, his reunion with Filippou for Kinds of Kindness shows that his desire to spit in the face of audience comfort is alive and well. This is a hilarious piece of work whose self indulgence I absolutely loved. I can’t recommend it to everyone, but the select few with a high tolerance for fuckery? This one’s for you.
Kinds of Kindness is split into three segments, all of which star Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie in varying roles, and Yorgos Stefanakos (an old friend of the director) as a character called R.M.F. In the first, titled ‘The Death of R.M.F’, Jesse Plemons has a Secretary-esque relationship with his boss (Dafoe) and learns the ramifications of straying from his prescribed behaviours. In the second, ‘R.M.F is Flying’, Plemons grieves the disappearance of his wife (Stone), who went missing at sea. But when she returns and her shoes don’t fit and she’s hornier than usual, he finds himself in a changeling scenario with a gruesome resolution. And in the third and final chapter, ‘R.M.F Eats a Sandwich’, Stone and Plemons play sex cult members seeking a twin who can reanimate the dead and bring about the rise of their messiah figure. Sitting through this most peculiar anthology will be a near Herculean task for some and an amusement park ride for others. Few directors elicit such varied responses from their work and it’s a tactic that clearly works for Lanthimos.
Despite their ever-present weirdness (or perhaps because of it), many of his films have received critical recognition and Kinds of Kindness is no different. It premiered at Cannes earlier this year, with a nomination for the Palme d’Or (losing out to Sean Baker’s hotly anticipated Anora) and a win for Plemons as Best Actor. Filmed from October to December of 2022, its title underwent many changes - from R.M.F to And - before settling on the puzzling (and according to the director, completely meaningless) final name. It seems Lanthimos and Filippou were more concerned with creating a trio of Aesopian fables that thrill, baffle, cause spittakes and, like all great Greek allegories, leave the viewer with more questions than answers. What does it all mean? Who is R.M.F? Why is Emma Stone dancing like that? Fret not, fellow cinephiles, for the point is not to fully grasp Kinds of Kindness but simply to inhale it with a slow, steady breath and enjoy the next 2 hours and 44 minutes.
This is a film about control, losing it and frantically trying to regain it, to tragic and amusing ends. If Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was a meditative triptych on the human condition then Kinds of Kindness is its glorious polar opposite, exploring our most animalistic, debauched urges and their unfortunate effects on others. It’s fitting that the title is a careless throwaway because none of the characters exhibit kindness - of any kind - and instead feel like the deservingly doomed subjects of a cautionary tale. This makes it much more enjoyable to witness their comedy of errors without being too disturbed by it all. So too do the performances, which are excellent all round, especially Jesse Plemons at his thinnest, most submissive, sexually fluid and paranoid. Kinds of Kindness juggles unexpected orgies and random bouts of violence with beautifully written dialogue and a confident, comedic tone that all coexist in perfect balance. It’s so sure of itself that you don’t have to be; what might be pre-requisites to fully enjoying it, though, are healthy levels of cynicism and more than a hint of disdain for the human race.
And if there’s ever been a time to up those levels, it’s now. The world’s falling apart and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, so it feels good to revel in deadpanery scored by Eurythmics and COBRAH while searching for meaning where it probably doesn’t exist. Kinds of Kindness being distributed to mainstream audiences is an act of sadism so hilarious that you can’t help but admire it. The Greeks invented the tragicomedy, after all, and it seems the genre is in good hands still.
So, will you enjoy Kinds of Kindness? It’s kind of like wondering if you’ll like the taste of your own blood after ripping out a hangnail, or peeling off dead skin and getting to a bit that’s not quite ready to come away and it stings a bit, but in a slightly satisfying way, you know? Results may differ – you won’t know until you try it. So try.
Verdict:
☆☆☆☆½
Kinds of Kindness is in select cinemas now. Go by yourself when you’re feeling a bit cranky and it might make things better.
