Kinds of Kindness: Yorgos Lanthimos Offers Three Kinds, All Weirdly Undercooked
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-
Yorgos Lanthimos earned his Oscar-winning-weirdo stripes this past year with his morbidly comedic and bawdy Frankenstein story Poor Things.
He’d had an earlier visit to the awards with the wry, but more conventional period piece The Favourite. But that was a departure from the audacious, wtf-did-I-just-see experience that is his trademark (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer).
So, what kind of weirdness awaits with his latest, Kinds of Kindness?
Three kinds, as it turns out. Kinds of Kindness is a triptych, three different stories with different characters, all starring Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe (the latter three fresh from their Poor Things experience).
There are different reasons for someone to produce an anthology. In some cases (New York Stories, Paris Je T’aime, the “double-bill” Grindhouse), it’s simply to showcase different directors with individual stories shorter than a feature. Others use it to entwine different narratives under a single theme or place (as in Jim Jarmusch’s terrifically constructed, Memphis-based, Mystery Train).
In Lanthimos’ case – a shared city and one repeated walk-on character aside - Kinds of Kindness comes off more like a promo-reel for three movie ideas the director and writer Efthimis Filippou haven’t fleshed out yet.
They are various levels of “interesting.” But given the paranoiac mood driving them (and one Twilight Zone-esque ironic ending), they seem more like the first three episodes of a streamed anthology series Lanthimos might have sold to Apple TV+ or Prime.
Instead, this thematic taster’s-menu by Chef Lanthimos is playing this week at a theatre near you. (I should mention cannibalism is one of the themes of the movie, along with necromancy)
Whatever his motivation, Kinds of Kindness is a difficult movie to grade, since the stories range from an intriguing tale that could use one more act, to at least one that arguably overstays its welcome.
The segments are named The Death of R.M.F., R.M.F. is Flying and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) is the aforementioned tangential character, and naming chapters after him almost seems like a punk. At the least, it makes R.M.F. a MacGuffin.
The Death of R.M.F. is the most solid of the three stories, an almost existential parable of what you give up when you give your entire life to an employer, in this case literally. Robert (Plemons) is a well paid executive office drone with a generous and paternal boss Raymond (Dafoe) given to strange gift-giving (a tennis racquet broken in a rage by John McEnroe, anyone?).
As it turns out, work imposes itself on his home life in every way, with his day planned by Raymond’s assistant Vivian (Qualley) down to the slightest detail, including marital lovemaking.
At a certain point, Plemons dares say no to a line-crossing demand. And there we see how his entire life is a creation of a single work-thread, a tapestry that unravels when the thread is broken.
The second R.M.F. story also blurs the lines between what is reality and fantasy, agency and acceptance. Daniel (Plemons) is a police officer whose wife Liz (Stone) has gone missing, possibly stranded on an island (the details are sketchy). And then she shows up, she’s the healthiest of two survivors.
Except Daniel becomes convinced this Liz is an imposter, and is soon undergoing psychiatric medical treatment. (The belief that your loved ones are imposters is a real pathology called Capgras Syndrome, one that publicly affected a Canadian actor some years back.)
But Lanthimos seems to not know what to do with the premise. Gore is added to the mix, as is a best-friends couple (Mamoudou Athie and Hong Chau) with whom Daniel and Liz have “swung.” When in doubt spice it up. And there’s plenty of doubt at the denouement of this chapter.
R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich has the most moving parts, with Stone and Plemons as a couple on a mission to find a bona fide transcendent person with the ability to raise the dead. They’re also members of a water-worshipping sex cult run by a man named Omi (Dafoe, in one of two roles in which he gets to control people’s intimate lives).
Kinds of Kindness is certainly a display of disparate kinds of weirdness. But unlike Poor Things, which was both provocative and told with absurd clarity, this anthology is a mixed bag of wannabe profundities.
Sometimes it nearly succeeds, but then there’s another story.
Kinds of Kindness. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou. Stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe. Opens in Canadian theatres June 28.