Kinds of Kindness

Split into three short films, with a rotation of the same actors including some from Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, Kinds of Kindness, explores identity, cults, free will, self-mutilation, and at its core, the need to belong.

The first film is set in a corporation where Robert (Jessie Plemons) is an employee controlled by his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated, from his appearance, to who he marries, to how often Robert and his wife have sex. When Raymond pushes Robert too far by ordering him to kill R.M.F (Yorgos Stefanakos), Robert objects, is ostracised by Raymond, and forced to confront the reality of his new freedom. It’s a straightforward story that eases into Lanthimos’s style. 

In the second, more baffling film, Daniel (Jessie Plemons) plays a troubled police officer whose wife, Liz (Emma Stone), is missing on an oceanic expedition. It’s made clear what Liz’s tastes are so that when she’s rescued and suddenly likes the things she once hated, Daniel is immediately suspicious. To test the authenticity of his wife, he pushes her boundaries by asking her to cook parts of her body for him – cue scenes of amputation and body horror. Lanthimos is now picking up speed in his eccentric ways. Though this is the most remarkable story of the three, acting as a palate cleanser between cult stories, it does feel out of place.

The third and final film is akin to the first. A cult following a prophecy predicting the coming of a woman who can resurrect the dead. Emily (Emma Stone) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) are sent out by cult leaders, Omi (Willem Dafoe), and Aka (Hong Chau) to find this woman. The cult lives in a compound separated from society and most of its members have abandoned their old lives. Emily has left her husband and daughter behind to join the cult but regularly breaks into their house, blessing it with ‘holy water’ and leaving gifts for her daughter. Serious complications arise when she starts having more direct contact with her family. Like Daniel in the first film, Emily is motivated by the cult’s reward for devotion system. Lanthimos escalates the ideas within a cult to make it more distinctive, but it does tread on similar territory to the first film.

While the first film is far more mundane compared to the others, each one provides enough intrigue. Corporation obedience and body horror to cult control. What I found jarring was the stop-start nature of each story, as each one ends with a shocking moment, you’re then forced to start again but it doesn’t cover enough new ground to justify the structure. A different experience from an episodic format like Black Mirror, which also extrapolates different ideas within one theme.

Kinds of Kindness has a bad habit of repeating itself, and while the stories are short and the last two are punchier, it’s limited by its structure and depth. Its saving grace is the cast, which as well as those already mentioned, includes Margret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn, Hunter Schafer, as well as Lanthimos’s style – both are doing some heavy lifting.

The three stories are tenuously connected by one character, R.M.F, whose name is in each title – though a rewatch is needed to see if the character is a more threaded connection, as it seems like he just appears in the first and last film.

The film’s mise-en-scène is necessarily clear and distinctive for each story, even down to the cast’s different costumes and styles, helping separate each character as you adjust to their new roles. 

Though Kind of Kindness came out very quickly after Poor Things, this is more reminiscent of Lanthimos’s older work like The Lobster and The Favourite, more art house and less mainstream, though still using non-realistic dialogue, emphasis on sounds, bodies, and extreme close-ups, though I think those three films have much more to say than this one.

Now I’ve stepped away and processed it, I would have preferred it be a tighter, more articulate story, one less reliant on Lanthimos’s style. This is by no means his strongest piece, but is at times an interesting, if repetitive examination of the human condition in extreme circumstances.

Overall **