Plenty of directors in Hollywood are no stranger to the old adage ‘one for them, one for me’, but it takes a very specific type of filmmaker to have the ‘ones for them’ be the strange and raucous The Favourite and Poor Things. Yet, with Kinds of Kindness, that’s exactly the sort of gauntlet that Yorgos Lanthimos has laid down, ditching the relative accessibility of his last two awards-darling efforts and going back to the disturbing basics his far more uncompromising entries like The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth. Kinds of Kindness is a surreal triptych anthology with a genuinely cruel and evil heart – one that makes it both impossible to recommend to anyone, yet just as impossible to forget once you have sat through it.
Using the same actors in shifting roles across the three stories to cast a cold eye over America’s societal neuroses, Kinds of Kindness mostly centres around Jesse Plemons, Lanthimos’s muse Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe, though strong support is consistently offered by Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Mamadou Athie. In the first segment, which is the shortest and most straightforward (though by no means easy viewing), Plemons (who won Best Actor at Cannes for his often genuinely unsettling work here) is front and centre as a high-flying employee at a mysterious job whose life unravels when his boss (Dafoe) asks him to kill a man with his car.
Things only get weirder from there, with story number two bringing us Plemons as an erratic cop (he makes tapes of the group sex he, his partner, and their wives have) whose maritime scientist wife (Stone) has recently returned from being lost at sea, but altered in ways that only Plemons’s character can seem to detect. Finally, we have the tale of Plemons and Stone as members of a cult (led, of course, by Dafoe), searching for a chosen one-type woman who they believe will have the power to raise the dead.
Throughout it all, though it is often darkly funny and its mysteries do really intrigue, Kinds of Kindness is a testing, even punishing, watch. Lanthimos, working with his traditional screenwriting partner Efthimis Filippou rather than The Favourite and Poor Things scribe Tony McNamara, needles in to specifically American anxieties about wealth, propriety, sex, and death, and the result is deeply uncomfortable. Much like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, he taps into the terror of feeling like you’re living in a world that is perfectly ordered and you, and you alone, have somehow made a wrong turn in it.
It’s harsh and provocative, though at two hours and forty-five minutes, it does eventually run out of its power to shock, especially in the overextended ending of the third story, which piles on the controversy and misery almost comically thick. An air of diminishing returns sets in and by the time Emma Stone is knifing a dog as part of a plan to drug, strip, and kidnap a sweet-natured vet played by Qualley, you might just be a little burnt out on it all.
From the off (Lanthimos originally wanted to give the film the marketing nightmare title of And, if that clues you in at all into his mean-spirited intentions here) Kinds of Kindness makes it very clear that this is a European arthouse auteur returning to his roots (though with an American cast and budget). Cold amorality is the name of the game here, without even the sort of viscerally grounding villain figure of Barry Keoghan in Sacred Deer to keep things more literally interpretable, and what it all means (if anything) is an answer kept defiantly far from our reach. Any film that can expel you from the cinema with a pit in your stomach like this is inarguably doing something impressive, but when that achievement is wrapped up in such an indulgent opaqueness, it’s hard to show it all that much love.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 