Kinds of Kindness suggests what it might have been like if Stanley Kubrick had directed a handful of Twilight Zone episodes.
A three-part anthology film from director Yorgos Lanthimos—the social satirist behind the likes of Kubrickian experiments such as The Lobster and Dogtooth—Kinds of Kindness places Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in each segment, where they each play different characters. “The Death of R.M.F.” follows an architect (Plemons) who willingly allows his boss (Dafoe) to control every detail of his life, including what he eats and when. In “R.M.F. is Flying,” a marine biologist (Emma Stone) comes home after barely surviving a disastrous expedition, but her police-officer husband (Plemons) senses that something fundamental about her has changed. The final installment, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” centers on a cult whose leader (Dafoe) has sent two members (Stone and Plemons) to find a woman who has been prophesied to be able to revive the dead.
Despite these wildly different, provocative plots, each section tastes the same: like a black lime—dry, sour, and bitter. You can search for a hint of sweetness—trying to trace acts of genuine kindness across the three stories, for instance—but mostly the film’s title registers as a dark, ironic joke. That’s nothing new from Lanthimos and his co-screenwriter, Efthimis Filippou, who previously worked together on The Lobster, Dogtooth, Alps, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Yet something about having this sensibility spread across three separate stories—rather than carried within a self-contained universe we become immersed in, no matter how perverse—makes Kinds of Kindness feel like a series of flippant, nasty asides.
Of course, it’s all ingeniously crafted, with Lanthimos’ camera returning to the more rigid sort of precision that defined his earlier films, before the wild swings and distorted lenses of The Favourite and Poor Things. (It’s this formal control, as well as the coldness, that recalls Kubrick.) And as a meditation on the art of performance—especially bold, outre performance—the movie is fascinating. Dafoe, a longtime boundary-pusher, nestles in comfortably in each part (his whipped hairdo as the cult leader is one of the movie’s better gags), while Stone continues to have fun exploding any “good-girl” expectations that may have survived her outlandish, Oscar-winning performance in Poor Things.
It’s Plemons, however—getting the amount of screen time he always deserves—who’s most riveting, perhaps because he wears the film’s weirdness like a second skin. Whether freezing up in the face of having to make a small decision for himself in the first part, passive-aggressively testing his (possibly) doppelganger wife in the second, or expressing a dead-eyed devotion to the cult in the third, Plemons roots each scenario in an individual reality. He rises above the movie’s rigidness to remind us that each of his characters is not just a sour joke or an intellectual conceit, but an unknowable, yet relatable, human.
(7/2/2024)
