Kinds of Kindness review: Yorgos Lanthimos is weirder, and worse, than ever

Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos takes Emma Stone and co back to his bleak roots in an anthology film that’s anything but kind.

Watching Kinds of Kindness, it’s hard not to think that director Yorgos Lanthimos observed the relative commercial appeal and appreciation for last year’s awards magnet Poor Things (winner of no less than four Oscars) and his film before that, The Favourite (2018), and thought he must be going soft.

After all, this is the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ filmmaker who made his name with brutal, surreal fare like 2010’s Dogtooth, and, in English, with The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), in which humans were subjected to all manner of casual indignities and fateful cruelty, both fantastical (turned into animals) and mundane (systematic domestic abuse).

Kinds of Kindness, from its highly ironic title on down, is Lanthimos, now armed with American actors and a bigger budget, going back to bizarro basics: putting his characters through the psychosexual wringer of their own misplaced desires, perversions and self-deceptions, in three consecutive, tangentially-connected narratives that triple down on the grimness of his fairytales.

Three is the tragic number

The same troupe of actors — most notably Poor Things alumni Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, alongside notable newcomer Jesse Plemons — play different roles in each story, linked only by a supporting character named R.M.F.

First up, ‘The Death of R.M.F.’, features white-collar worker Robert (Plemons), whose every action, in the office and at home, is controlled by his boss Raymond (Dafoe). When Robert balks at repeating an auto accident that apparently didn’t injure himself or the other party, R.M.F., severely enough, Raymond cuts him off with immediate effect, leading to Robert’s desperate attempts to reingratiate himself.

‘R.M.F. is Flying’ stars Plemons again as police officer Daniel, whose biological researcher wife Liz (Stone) has gone missing on an expedition. When she’s eventually found, however, Daniel harbours suspicions that the returnee isn’t his wife at all, leading to some extreme tests of spousal loyalty.

And finally, in ‘R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich’, Emily (Stone) has abandoned her husband and young daughter to join a strange sex cult with odd notions of purity, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau). When they send her off on a mission to find a spiritual leader with powers of resurrection, Emily risks ex-communication from the fold…

The killing of sacred cows

Searchlight Pictures

The seldom-seen R.M.F. aside, there’s nothing really to connect these stories other than the bleakness of tone shot through with the blackest of humour. Lanthimos, reunited with his original co-writer Efthimis Filippou (who, tellingly, did not script his colleague’s last two features), is probing ideas of control and subjugation, within the corporate world, the home front, and the spiritual (if that’s what you can call Dafoe and Chau’s sexual disciples).

None of these belief systems offer any comfort or consolation to those trapped inside. And anyone who tries to buy into them with even more fervor only gets more enmeshed in a waking nightmare of isolation, emotional and, ultimately, physical violence.

Lanthimos’s films have never shied away from the extreme and there’s plenty of explicit scenes featured here, even animal cruelty. In fact, everything feels specifically designed to aggravate, even repel, anyone who enjoyed the baroque flourishes of Lanthimos’ two previous films, caustic as they were, and found something touching, even hopeful about them, particularly Bella Baxter’s female emancipation journey.

The New Orleans locations seem to have been chosen for their alienating anonymity. And Poor Things composer Jerskin Fendrix follows his Oscar-nominated debut musical score with a series of disquieting piano chords and ominous choral voices that only underscore the unfolding malaise.

There’s much to be said for filmmakers who fearlessly confront our worst impulses. However, Lanthimos’s worst films — The Killing of a Sacred Deer and now this — have a wanton malice with seemingly little purpose.

His best — Dogtooth and The Lobster — also highlight some of mankind’s baser instincts, but also give you a glimpse of the dark reasoning behind them. Kinds of Kindness, with the actors largely directed to speak in a clipped, brusque monotone, is more a pile-on of the former, and a lesser work as a result. It should also be said, the underlying conceits of the second and third story, are thin at best.

Actors out on a limb

Searchlight Pictures

To give Lanthimos credit, his cast are clearly game for anything. Stone seems even more intent than in Poor Things, to push herself ever further away from the comforts of La La Land in every way. Plemons confirms his consummate versatility, effortlessly transforming from Robert’s plaintive need to be loved, to Daniel’s dead-eyed distrust of his wife’s true identity. So, it’s a shame that so many of the others, particularly Chau, Mamadou Athie and Joe Alwyn, are given so little to do in any of the stories.

And for all its flaws, there are still a couple of very funny gags. Dafoe’s domineering boss bestows hilariously inappropriate sporting artifact gifts on Robert when he’s obedient. And when a grieving Daniel requests that his friends watch with him an old videotape of his then still-missing wife, the resulting footage is as uproarious as it is outrageous.

Kinds of Kindness review: 2/5

Yorgos Lanthimos and his collaborators may be working without a safety net, in an attempt to recalibrate him back to his edgier, freakier tendencies. But they’re also lacking the insight and liberating sense of possibility of his best work. Taken independently, each of the three stories here are minor works, closed ecosystems that wallow in their own misery. Taken as a whole, Kinds of Kindness is kind of a chore.

Kinds of Kindness is in theaters on June 21. Check out our new movies guide to what else is coming to the big screen soon.