How far would you go to prove your love to another person? Acts of devotion— heightened to their most extreme, absurdist peaks— are in a way what just about all of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are about, harkening back to his breakout third feature, 2009’s Dogtooth (in which parents protect their children from the outside world by keeping them inside a compound and feeding them lies). Those who hopped on board with Lanthimos’ previous two, more generally palatable films (The Favourite and Poor Things, both penned by screenwriter Tony McNamara) may be turned off by his latest feature, Kinds of Kindness, a nearly three-hour anthology movie that reunites Lanthimos as cowriter with Efthimis Filippou and is as biting and gruesome as their previous collaborations. And yet, it’s almost all surface level shock value, lacking the thematic heft to make it feel like much more than a circuitous, self-indulgent exercise.
Kinds of Kindness consists of three separate stories: “The Death of R.M.F.”, “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” They are united only by a common cast who rotate between different characters in each story, a mysterious figure called R.M.F. (played by Yorgos Stefanakos), and a consistent theme: extreme acts of devotion. In “The Death of R.M.F.”, Robert (Jesse Plemons) is a man whose life is controlled in every aspect by his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe, a delightfully slimy little freak): what he eats, what he reads, when he has sex with his wife (Hong Chau), whether or not they have any children. But when Robert declines to do something extreme that Raymond asks of him, his life as he knows it falls apart, and he begins to spiral as he fights to piece it back together again. In “R.M.F. is Flying,” Daniel (Plemons) is a cop whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) is lost at sea. She’s found and returned home, but begins behaving differently from the woman he knew before, prompting Daniel to become increasingly erratic and place increasingly harmful demands on Liz to prove her love to him. In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are members of a cult led by Omi, who travel around the area searching for a woman they believe is capable to raising the dead. The cult has very specific rules about outside contamination; when Emily inadvertently violates them, she works even harder to find the person they are looking for and prove her loyalty to them.
Even in the lightest of plot sketches, the common thread that unites these otherwise disparate stories- which open to the electric beat of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”- is clear. The deadpan humor, conveyed via affected line readings, the bizarre scenarios and absurd imagery (such as an interstitial of dogs behaving as humans, a comedic allusion to something Liz says to her father in the second story), and the talents of the cast (which also includes Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and, briefly, Hunter Schafer, all great) keep Kinds of Kindness consistently watchable, but just barely. The film’s unfortunate structure works against it. Like most anthologies, some stories are better executed than others; in the case of Kinds of Kindness, the movie comes right out of the gate with the strongest story, and only declines in quality from there. Plemons— who won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, where this film premiered in May— serves as strong connective tissue. He’s excellent not only at serving a wide variety of fits (the costuming for all the characters, for the record, is exquisite), but playing men who are both a little insane, a little dangerous, and a little pathetic, the latter eliciting sympathy even against our better judgements. He’s the lead and co-lead of the first two stories; in the last, he takes a backseat to Stone who— coming hot off of her Oscar-winning collaboration with Lanthimos in Poor Things— is very good, but playing a character who doesn’t read as complicated as she seems. That’s really where the third act flounders: Stone’s Emily has a husband (played by Joe Alwyn) and young daughter back home, and even though she left them for the cult, she still seems to be pulled back to them. But the question remains, why? Why did she leave? Where was she at in her life that joining a magic sex cult was more appealing than staying home with her family? These are questions that linger over the story, but that the filmmakers don’t seem interested in answering.
Nor does Kinds of Kindness seem interested in elevating its themes beyond abject cruelty. There’s a lot of body mutilation throughout, but it’s how the film handles sexual abuse and control exerted over women’s bodies that is particularly distasteful. Poor Things is all about a woman’s sexuality— explicitly so— but that woman is always the one in control. Kinds of Kindness twists it as if to say, “look at what happens when you love too much;” it abuses its characters, and promptly shrugs it off. Whether the outcome of each story appears positive or negative or somewhere in between, the violent and often violating impact of proving your love covers it like a festering scab, and women are almost always the victims. I wouldn’t expect Lanthimos to make an optimistic movie— that isn’t his bag— but I wish he found more to say with Kinds of Kindness beyond its unpleasant trappings.
Kinds of Kindness is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 164 minutes. Rated R.
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