Kind of Cruel

The pounding, squishy-fuzzy synth chords of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) open Yorgos Lanthimos’ sadistic-masochistic omnibus Kinds of Kindness, and that hypnotic 1983 Eurythmics earworm sets the tone, not to mention the theme, of this thrillingly original alt-screwball dramedy of manners. 

Some of the characters in this trippy triptych want to use you, some of them want to get used by you. Some want to abuse you, some want to be abused. And sometimes that means cutting off your finger to feed it to your husband — at his behest. Let’s face it: everybody’s looking for something. Who am I to disagree?

KINDS OF KINDNESS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou
Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer
Running time: 165 mins

In one story, eccentric corner-office boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) controls every life choice for blandly affluent office worker Robert (Jesse Plemons), starting with who he should marry (Hong Chao), right down to his daily caloric intake. “Skinny men are the most ridiculous things,” sighs Raymond. Another tale shows anxious husband Daniel (also Plemons) reuniting with his lost-at-sea wife Liz (Emma Stone), only to get the sneaking, and ultimately overwhelming, suspicion that she’s a not-quite-exact doppelgänger. The finale follows two no-nonsense sex cultists Andrew and Emily (again Plemons and Stone) trying to find a woman with the power to revive the dead. And when their pansexual leaders (Dafoe and Chao redux) kick out Emily, her life spirals into obsession.

The deadly deadpan Kinds of Kindness, coming of course from the impish Lanthimos and his frequent writing partner Efthimis Filippou, is meant to mock the titular heavenly virtue, despite its sassy-catchy wordplay. Instead of a celebration, it offers a varietal of vice: namely envy — or, more precisely, its logical extension, cruelty.

The conceit gives Lanthimos, whose jarringly surrealist and occasionally heartbreaking films always embrace the physical as a window into the emotional, a license for lasciviousness that requires a lot of bedhopping: eager, consensual, enticed, roofied, foursome, threesome, you name it. Violence is always under the surface, too, until it isn’t, with savage flourishes that startle with an ugly chuckle.

Hot off the worldwide acclaim of Poor Things, which won Stone her second Oscar, Lanthimos reteams with his leading lady as well as her fictional father Dafoe, looping in Plemons and Chao, along with Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer in smaller parts. The ensemble returns in different roles for each one of the three short films in Kinds of Kindness, all entitled cryptically — “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” — after a peripheral character named R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos).

The film often feels like an extended prank. Robert and his wife have a dark collection of sports memorabilia, from a John McEnroe-twisted tennis racquet to a scorched racing helmet that once belonged to Ayrton Senna. Liz insists that she was on an island where dogs were in charge. “People were animals and animals were people,” she insists. “They’re playing us for fools,” one character pleads to another. To paraphrase an on-screen doctor, audiences might feel a mild form of persecutory delusion. More to the point: it seems like Lanthimos is once again fucking with us, as he is prone to do in his absurdist movies, having earned a true authorial status as a postmodern fabulist that sometimes just comes off a strained gimmick.

Kinds of Kindness straddles that vibe throughout, since the three narratives are equally bizarre but inconsistently engaging treatises on human desperation. The first is the sharpest and most profound, disorienting and relatable in its study of how people can let others manipulate them — and how difficult, if not terrifying, independence can be.

The other two have slightly diminishing returns. The tale of the man whose unease around a rescued wife who maybe might not actually be his wife is a great parable of the unknowability of identity — not only others’ but our own — but doesn’t feel as fully formed as its predecessor. And the sex-cult third entry runs on a bit too long, with a meandering Emily whose disorientation after her group expulsion mirrors the movie’s own unfocused eventual disinterest in her emotional journey. Its sudden resolution feels like a filmmaker bailing on his own premise.

Still, Kinds of Kindness is the kind of challenging adult entertainment that’s harder and harder to come by. It’s a serious look at average people navigating a world that all too often feels alarmingly unserious. Lanthimos is an alchemical director who, at his best, can turn bathos into pathos with whiplash accuracy. Fair to say that this kooky collection of stressed-out seriocomic delights has a melancholic tug that’s hard to shake. It also has one of the best uses of Rio’s Rainbow in the Dark that I never thought I ever wanted to see so badly.