Kinds of Kindness: The End! No Moral!

After the Cannes screening of Kinds of Kindness, a prevailing narrative emerged that the movie was director Yorgos Lanthimos' attempt to pull back from his recent mainstream approval. While Lanthimos has been a critical favorite for years, with 2009's Dogtooth landing a prize at Cannes and a nomination at the Academy Awards, he was never the type of director you'd discuss over Thanksgiving dinner. And then 2018's The Favourite came out, landed 10 Oscar nominations, and cleared nearly $100 million at the box office. Even Poor Things, a film with more explicit sex scenes than any movie I've ever seen at a theater chain at 3 in the afternoon, dazzled critics and audiences alike. In short, the Greek filmmaker hit the big time in the past 5 years, becoming beloved, successful, and seemingly untouchable in his chosen field.

Lanthimos loves a fall from grace and loves to see characters smart enough to make the right moves but dumb enough to think that the good days will last forever. What must it feel like to be living out a story similar to what he’s explored in his filmography? It might  make you want to try torpedoing it all yourself. It might be worth making a movie actively antagonistic to the audience that got you where you are just to see if they're willing to follow along. Which brings us to Kinds of Kindness.

This anthology film (a kiss of death at the box office) clocks in at nearly 3 hours long. While The Favourite and Poor Things had clear genre trappings or one-sentence synopses that could lock in an ambivalent viewer, Lanthimos seems to have deliberately pivoted to a movie that’s impossible to market or even discuss in a way that makes it appealing to anyone not already on board. And for the first time since 2017, Yorgos returns to collaborating with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, recreating the thorny, audience-unfriendly tone they created for Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth. 

Kindness follows three unrelated stories, each segment named after R.M.F., a character played by Lanthimos' real-life buddy (Yorgos Stefanakos) who barely figures into the plot. Lanthimos and Filippou inject a shaggy-dog-story energy to the plots that, depending on your enjoyment of Norm McDonald or Nikolai Gogol, will either delight or frustrate you. Characters are in pain, unable to express their emotions, bouncing between scenes until it all ends with clinical, random violence. There's a meandering, woodenness to the screenplay, to the acting, even the visuals. The cinematography is striking but focused on the mundane, liminal spaces of Americana: hospital rooms, McMansions, motel parking lots, suburbs, and the like. There's none of the lush, hyperreal vividness of Poor Things or the period piece splendor of The Favourite. This is a return to form for a director interested in the places that us regular people actually spend the majority of our time in, doing the things we have to do to get through life: working for a shitty boss, mourning the loss of a loved one, searching for spiritual meaning wherever we can find it. 

Kinds of Kindness counterbalances its off-kilter tone and structure through its showcase of the actors populating its weird little world. The central cast is a who's who of acting talent: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn, and Willem Dafoe. These are actors' actors—the kind who disappear into a role without ever letting you forget the name of the person you're watching perform. They draw attention to the performance without distracting from the on-screen narrative, and Lanthimos gives them a wide-open canvas to show off their skills. 

In each of the three stories, these  actors twist and squeeze their familiar personas into new characters. In "R.M.F. Goes Flying," Stone plays a woman who's returned from being lost at sea just a bit… off. Her eyes pivot from loving to cold and alien between scenes so sharply that you start to believe her husband (Plemons) when he suspects that she's not actually his wife returned from sea. And in the third segment, "R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich," she plays a woman in a sex cult desperate to impress the charismatic leaders (Dafoe and Chau) by finding the next messiah. Here, she's a raw nerve of a woman so tightly wound that her Dodge Challenger and reckless driving seems almost medicinal, like she couldn't function in the world without some sort of release.

Meanwhile, Dafoe proves once again that he's one of the best actors to ever do it, injecting a sincere affection and love into even his most twisted characters. In the first story, "The Death of R.M.F.," Raymond (Dafoe) is the world's worst boss, controlling every aspect of Robert's (Plemons) life, from his meals—"A skinny man is ridiculous," Raymond tells him early in the film—to his wife's fertility. But even when he's asking Robert to kill a man to prove his devotion, Dafoe gives off a sense of paternal pride like a loving but hateful god.

And Plemons, arguably America's most underrated scene-stealer, finally gets a movie to sink his teeth into. The film is a push-and-pull between him and Stone—he's the main character in "The Death of R.M.F.", they share the screen in "R.M.F. Goes Flying," and he takes a small step back in "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich." But whether he's playing a sad-sack loser in one segment or a fully onboard cult member in another, Plemons dominates the screen. 

Qualley, Chau, Alwyn, and Athie all get their own chances to display their range. The anthology format and stripped-down tone lets the cast find more subtle ways to emphasize vulnerability, and the long runtime forces a viewer to pay close attention to the way one performance feeds into and contrasts against the next iteration. Like following an acting troupe from show to show, Kinds gives the audience a chance to appreciate the actors' quirks, strengths, and flexibility through different contexts. 

The pleasure is in the journey, not the destination, and if you're still expecting a satisfying climax that ties up the loose ends and explains why R.M.F. gets title billing and no lines, that's on you for not adjusting your expectations by the halfway point. But for those who can follow the movie on its unique wavelength, this might just be their favorite Lanthimos in over a decade. It's a stunning display of arrogance and self-indulgence, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

Kinds of Kindness is, like Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, the type of movie most directors don't get the chance to make. Win or lose, it's always fun to watch someone gamble with the house's money, and the film world is all the better for Lanthimos returning to his darkly comic, nihilistic works in between high-brow crowd pleasers.

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