Kinds of Kindness REVIEW – Kind of Good

Kinds of Kindness
Kinds of Kindness

Just over three months after Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos’s last collaboration won Stone her second Best Actress Oscar and garnered Lanthimos a nomination for Best Director as well as Best Picture, the two are already gracing screens with their next provocation. Make no mistake, Kinds of Kindness is a provocation. The three stories that make up the anthology, each of which features the same cast of actors in different roles, all include at least one scene that seems designed to upset or anger the audience.

The first, “The Death of R.M.F.,” centers on Robert (Jesse Plemons), whose life is dictated in every aspect by his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe), as he comes up against a command that he cannot perform: get into a car accident that might kill the other driver. The second, “R.M.F. is Flying,” sees Liz (Stone) return home after a shipwreck left her missing for weeks, but her husband Daniel (Plemons) thinks the woman who has returned is not his wife. Finally, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” tracks Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) as they seek the foretold messiah of their cult by tracking down young women who meet specific prophesied criteria.

Besides the casts, which also include Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn, the segments also share the central theme of control, various motifs, and the eponymous tertiary character R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos). Dreams, hunger and food, children and childbearing, and growing paranoia play a role in each of the stories, but all are centered firmly around control. Control in the form that might be enacted through a phrase like “do me a kindness,” control that masks itself as love and care.

It’s a theme that’s been at the heart of Lanthimos’ work for more than a decade, going back at least as far as 2009’s Dogtooth in which parents keep their adult children from the outside world and force them into increasingly taboo sexual activity. Over the last decade and a half, he’s managed to create some of the most simultaneously unnerving and hilarious scenes through his exploration of this kind of manipulation in his films, but Kinds of Kindness feels more like a bid to recapture old glory than a victory lap.

The dialogue is delivered halfway between naturalism and the clipped, extremely precise language of The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Details of the characters’ lives, like past participation in filmed group sex that’s now regretted and the purposeful poisoning of a wife’s reproductive system, don’t flesh out the world so much as they register as weak attempts at shock. That sense of hollow shock value then colors the more genuine, or at least plot necessitated, darkness of the stories, leaving much of the movie in a purgatory between try hard hell and transgressive art heaven.

Within that purgatory, some of the film remains a pure delight. Watching an incredibly talented cast (Plemons absolutely deserves the Best Actor award he received at Cannes) deftly maneuver between and combine the tones of comedy, horror, thriller, and more will always be enjoyable. The film looks great thanks to cinematographer Robbie Ryan, and the score, courtesy of composer Jerskin Fendrix, flits between plinky and banging piano with moments of overwhelming choruses keeps viewers on their toes. Then there’s the simple joy of characters in funny outfits that each segment delivers at least once.

Kinds of Kindness will be divisive, it’s a nearly three hour long film with a perhaps too blatant theme that’s sometimes too self-consciously edgy, but is also full of brilliant performances and manages to wring some moments of greatness out of its premise. There’s no knowing where you’ll land unless you see it, I’ve seen it and land fairly firmly in the middle.

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Kinds of Kindness
Verdict
Kinds of Kindness has great performances from a fantastic cast, and delivers some of Lanthimos’s trademark black comedy, but it often feels as if it's trying too hard to provoke its audience.
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