In his signature dark, disorienting style, Yorgos Lanthimos delivers a star-studded, three-part drama that delves into the disturbing dynamics of abusive relationships, writes Yasmin Omar.
Hope is in short supply in the bleak, warped worlds of Yorgos Lanthimos. For him, a happy ending is a steak knife to the eye. His latest, the Cannes-winning Kinds of Kindness, is a typically unsettling triptych beset by a creeping sense of dread. Its three, loosely connected stories take place in a society that resembles our own, pretty much. There are family structures and corporate hierarchies, police departments and medical facilities. Squint, though, and the oddities (hiding in plain sight) reveal themselves. Lanthimos has a gift for constructing unreal situations – a planned car crash, a purity-determining sauna, an island ruled by spaghetti-slurping dogs – and, somehow, tapping into the real feelings that govern them.
The film’s characters, played by a revolving ensemble led by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley (among others), are largely damaged people, shuffling through life trying to find answers. Despite the movie’s plural title, they are subjects/architects of only one kind of kindness: the insincere, favour-currying kind used to dominate, manipulate and control. On the face of it, none of the obfuscating platitudes that define our speech appear to exist in Kinds of Kindness’ wonky, uncanny universe. As in Lanthimos’ other films, there is a tell-it-as-it-is bluntness to all conversations: cocktail orders and wife-swapping four-way orgies are treated with the same flat matter-of-factness. If Dafoe’s authoritarian wants Plemons’ subservient to gain weight, he will simply come out with it. And yet, it is – as anyone who’s ever been in an argument well knows – not what you say, but how you say it that counts. Velvet-toned requests, however extreme, are easy to acquiesce to; so too are the ones frothing with rage, or limned with disappointment.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Kinds of Kindness is a treatise on abuse, carefully plotting how its tendrils grow and spread and strangle. Its reliance on an anthology structure, whose diffuse narratives often leave audiences feeling shortchanged, proves chillingly effective, since each film compounds the spiderwebbing alarm. The very design pushes you to the cliff edge of unease. Jerskin Fendrix’s score, comprising piano keys hammering discordantly together and a choir droning ominously like bees in a hive, is used sparingly, and unnervingly. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s extreme close-ups – of dental floss scraping gums, orange flesh squelching against a juicer – are similarly destabilising, much like his shift to black and white for inky nightmare sequences. Invariably, though, it’s the stories’ subject matter that most disturbs. All three concern an abuser (who benignly demands destruction) and an abused (who self-punishingly enacts their evil doings).
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
In the first one, ‘The Death of RMF’, Dafoe’s Raymond makes every single decision on behalf of an unquestioning Robert (Plemons), from which pair of socks to put on in the morning to whether he and his wife have children. In the second, ‘RMF is Flying’, Stone’s missing, presumed dead Liz miraculously returns, but her partner (Plemons), convinced she’s an imposter, does everything in his power to grind her down. The final puzzle piece, ‘RMF Eats a Sandwich’, finds Emily (Stone) lured back into the home of her estranged husband Joseph (Joe Alwyn), whose nice-guy veneer quickly, horrifyingly crumbles. The threat of violence hangs ominously over Kinds of Kindness and, at times, rears its head. It’s present in the way Raymond territorially pulls back the lapel of Robert’s jacket, the way Joseph forcefully grabs Emily’s hand as she moves to leave.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Rather than the clipped, affectless performances Lanthimos guided his casts towards in his earlier, Greek-language work, he gives this ensemble latitude to switch it up; deadpan is still the default, but desperation simmers and overflows by each story’s end. Jesse Plemons, who took home Cannes’ Best Actor trophy for the film, moves fluently between misery and malevolence, while Margaret Qualley – who thankfully has more to do here than she did in her four-word Poor Things (2023) role – is defiantly strong-willed, and Willem Dafoe is sleekly, menacingly oppressive.
Emma Stone deserves a lot of credit. She has two Oscars and the world at her feet, but prefers to collaborate with Lanthimos on freaky curios that require her to fellate nightsticks and carve out her own organs as opposed to following a more conventional, A-list path. More power to her. Her three Kinds of Kindness parts aren’t as transformative as Poor Things’ Bella Baxter (a tall order), however they offer different, credible expressions of what it means to be a survivor. It is her stoicism, her suffering that grounds the film’s heightened circumstances.
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Kinds of Kindness is abstract enough that you can, within reason, read what you want into it. Is ‘The Death of RMF’ a veiled critique of how our employers rob us of our agency? Could be. Does ‘RMF Eats a Sandwich’ expose the autonomy-crushing spirit of the cult leader? It’s certainly possible. One thing is for sure, though: this is a film about the all too common instinct for some people to cut off bigger and bigger pieces of themselves (quite literally, in some cases) and give them over, hot and bloody, to their tormentors. It stokes the flames of trauma, exploitation and deceit. Hope may be in short supply in Kinds of Kindness – as illustrated by the final story’s last-minute swerve from jubilation to despair – but when other emotions are running so high, it doesn’t feel like a loss.
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