Kinds of Kindness opens in theaters June 21. This review is based on a screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
After grandiose detours like Poor Things and The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to his bleak, acerbic best with Kinds of Kindness. A triptych of thematically-related (but entirely separate) stories led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons, the film comes steeped in the razor-sharp malice of the director's Dogtooth days and exemplifies the violent absurdism that launched Lanthimos and the “Greek Weird Wave” in the first place. Given the director's success in Hollywood, Kinds of Kindness feels like some vicious sleight of hand. Lanthimos’ latest is quite the opposite of the eye-popping dark comedies that made him a magnet for Oscar nominations: a grimy, blood-soaked series of dry and violent satires about love, obsession and control. It’s one of the most delightfully nasty American studio films in quite some time.
In the first story, Plemmons plays diligent office drone Robert, a man whose routine is dictated and controlled – down to his meals and sexual activities – by his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Strange gifts from Raymond give way to even stranger requests, which are likely to hurt Robert and get other people killed, but Robert's borderline-romantic dedication to his paternalistic boss ensures a winding moral dilemma.
With minor roles populated by heavy-hitters like Stone, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, this twisted fairytale of masculine expectations winds the clock back on Lanthimos' tonal approach by several years, while also propelling his visual style forward. It echoes The Killing of a Sacred Deer not only in premise, but performance style, with Plemmons dialing back any sense of showiness or nuance. His stilted, withdrawn delivery forces the actor to play only the objective of a given scene, enhancing Robert's desperation to please. These typical Lanthimos flourishes come wrapped in a brand new packaging courtesy of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who shoots New Orleans the way Paul Thomas Anderson captures Los Angeles in Punch-Drunk Love and Licorice Pizza: as a place of uncomfortably sweaty nights, stinging high-contrast colors, and streetlight lens flares that bombard the senses.
The dissonance between this visual vibrance and the characters' cold, calculating demeanor is especially present in the second story, in which Plemmons plays police officer Daniel, whose wife Liz (Stone) has gone missing at sea, and who sees her face in the petty criminals he arrests. Plemmons' sympathy-endearing, puppy-dog misery also carries over from the first fable, but when Liz is finally rescued, Daniel’s inability to reconcile her return leads him down the bizarre path of demanding loyalty tests in the form of self-mutilation. (The “kindness” in the movie’s title – renamed from the SEO-unfriendly “And” – recalls the twisted acts of devotion or “kindnesses” in the Rebeca Hall-led Resurrection).
The metaphor here is entirely on-the-nose – it's a tale of how people are changed by difficult circumstances, and how those changes cause fissures in relationships – leading to an occasionally repetitive nihilism. But the turns it takes are entirely unexpected, if only because of how viscerally wince-inducing they turn out to be. All the while, Jerskin Fendrix’s off-kilter score throughout all three stories, comprising harsh, out-of-tune piano notes and blaring, monosyllabic vocalizations, makes even the movie's wildest turns feel hypnotic.
Each lead in these stories is driven by some kind of obsession: The third and longest part of Kinds of Kindness sees Stone playing a woman who’s left behind her family commitments in pursuit of a macabre religious mission. Occasionally, black-and-white dreams or visions hammer home just how psychologically rooted the characters’ desires are. The dizzying preposterousness of each tale also makes for an immense acting showcase for all involved. They deliver proclamations of devotion with such straight-faced audacity that it plays like a perfectly executed prank, and Lanthimos occasionally conjures striking compositions of gentle, non-sexual nudity (including trans nudity) that feel like the product of immense collaborative trust. A film that walks such a fine tonal tight-rope ought not to benefit from such gestures toward the fourth wall, but this metatextual wink also lets us in on the overarching joke.
Such quirks are no mere background detail in in Lanthimos' films – they’re defining characteristics. The drama emerges and deepens as he turns the dial marked "idiosyncrasy" slowly up to 11, driving his characters slowly to the brink of madness while keeping them constantly tethered to a sense of remorse. He also has a gleeful amount of fun while doing so, yielding a movie verging on misanthropic to the point of gallows humor, and led by a cast simply bursting at the seams to reach each story's inevitable emotional crescendo. They seem to have had a ball playing in Lanthimos' sandbox for 2 hours and 45 minutes, giving off cursed vibes sure to enrapture any audience member who's ready and willing.
