You could endlessly pick apart “Kinds of Kindness,” but I don’t recommend it. The closest to a précis you’ll get for the film comes at the start, when the strains of the Eurythmics’ banger “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” ring out over the opening titles. The lyrics repeat the discomfiting notion that:
Some of them want to use you.
Some of them want to get used by you.
Some of them want to abuse you.
Some of them want to be abused.
Well, who am I to disagree?
“Kinds of Kindness” is a return to a certain form of form, if you will, for the director Yorgos Lanthimos, fresh off his warmer, cuddlier films “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.” His earlier movies, “Dogtooth,” “Alps,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster” — all four written with Efthimis Filippou, who was his collaborator on “Kinds” — are less accessible, more deranged, less logical, more disturbing. Which is of course why they’re so polarizing. And so beloved.
I expect “Kinds of Kindness” to take its place among that latter group, with its vibrantly, defiantly off-putting stance and sidesplittingly sick sense of humor. It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps. All three share a cast that includes some returning Lanthimos players, like Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone, who won her second Oscar earlier this year for “Poor Things.” There are newcomers, too: Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn and especially Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize at Cannes for his performance.
Plemons is the main character for most of the film. In the first segment, he plays a man whose every move is dictated by his boss (Dafoe), until it isn’t. In the second, Plemons is a cop whose researcher wife (Stone) goes missing on a desert island; when she returns, he’s convinced she’s not actually his wife. And in the third, Plemons and Stone play members of a strange cult (led by Dafoe and Chau) who are desperately seeking a young woman who will become its spiritual leader.
It’s all presented with the eerie air of a very dark comedy, the sort where sudden savagery can come crashing through the wall at any second. Violence and cruelty are the drivers of “Kinds of Kindness,” often presented not as the opposite of that kindness but as kindness itself. This strange world calls for delicious off-kilter performances, and the cast — particularly Stone, who’s proven her mettle in this regard, and Plemons — deliver. If you think you know what’s happening in a scene, just wait.
I mentioned the temptation to endlessly pick it apart. “Kinds of Kindness” unabashedly invites that treatment. Each of the three stories, for instance, has its own title in which a character named “R.M.F.” is mentioned; he shows up at the start of the first, “The Death of R.M.F.” (which, just to mess with us, also mostly features characters whose first and last names begin with R and F). But is this the R.M.F.? Is it the same guy in all three films? And, if so, what does that mean for the actors playing very different characters in each segment?
If tiny tidbits like this are a key to unlock some mystery, I haven’t figured it out yet after two viewings. But this is not a puzzle box movie; it’s a Lanthimos joint. That means it displays certain stylistic tics, especially a deadpan, almost robotic dialogue delivery and strangely insular, often airless settings. The tie that binds his whole filmography together is a fascination with the brutal dynamics of power that govern human relationships: parent to child, husband to wife, ruler to subject, woman to man. Lanthimos’s characters tend to speak their minds bluntly, which strips away any social niceties. It’s as if he’s trying to peel the skin and muscle off the skeleton of human society, and if it’s kind of gross, well, that’s the point.
Threaded through the three segments of “Kinds of Kindness” is a fascination with one dynamic in particular — the desire to dominate, or to be dominated, or quite possibly both. It only takes a peek into a schoolyard or a political arena to see that a lot of people want to be told what to do, and other people want to be the tellers.
That means there are many ways to read “Kinds of Kindness,” pretty much all of which will be supported by the text. Domination shows up all over contemporary life, in part because the proliferation of choices present to most of us — about what we’ll wear, what we’ll do, what we’ll eat, who we’ll be — can throw us into chaos. This accounts, in part, for the abundance of cults we’re always watching documentaries about. It can feel counterintuitive, but the scariness of boundless freedom sometimes manifests in a desire to find someone who can tell us what to do.
So the reading that wouldn’t leave me — and this may say more about me than the movie — is that “Kinds of Kindness” skewers a particular strain of “wellness culture,” or maybe the seedy underbelly of the “life coach” industrial complex. I don’t want to say too much, but in the first film, Plemons’s character loses all sense of himself and reality when he is no longer handed instructions for his daily life, a routine that’s time-stamped and microplanned, right down to his menu and whether or not he’ll have sex that night. A similar spinout happens in the third film, when Stone’s character is deemed not clean enough, in her purity-obsessed cult, to be granted the privilege of being controlled anymore. There’s a sense that deviation from regulated expectations results in madness.
You may see something else in “Kinds of Kindness.” There are many ways to read a fable, especially one as unhinged as this. You might love it. You might hate it. You might find yourself obsessed with it, or you might dismiss it as a load of hogwash. Who am I to disagree?
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