Kinds of Kindness

One of the more surprising recent developments in cinema for me has been the rise to fame of a Greek avant-garde filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos. His films satirize the darker aspects of human nature, usually in forms of ego and control, and they employ bizarre, sometimes alarming narrative devices. The gallows humor and the challenging depictions of sexual behavior, were not a liability in the art film world. But his English language films, that he started making in 2015, have gained him a much wider audience. His last two movies actually won some Oscars. So how did such an uncompromising artist achieve mainstream success? I think his films offer painful ideas that are connecting with our painful times.

His latest film is called Kinds of Kindness. Teaming up with his former co-screenwriter Efthimos Philippou, Lanthimos returns in this film to the difficult aesthetic of his earlier stuff. The film consists of three separate stories, with a group of the same actors playing most of the characters in each story. Foremost among them are Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.

In the first story, Plemmons plays an enigmatic fellow who deliberately rams his car into that of an older man with the initials RMF, whom we have already seen being given a package by Qualley’s character in an earlier scene. Her husband is a sinister corporate executive played by Dafoe. Plemmons’ character, we then learn, is under the complete control of this CEO, who tells him what to do in every aspect of his life, even deciding whom he should marry. In fact, he controls him sexually as well. But this timid follower played by Plemmons is unwilling to kill RMF by smashing into his car more forcefully, and because of this, his controller loses confidence in him.

In the second story, Plemmons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, has been in a helicopter crash. The pilot, RMF, has died, but she survives and returns home, only to have her husband develop the paranoid belief that she’s not really his wife, but some kind of replacement. It is this husband that is trying to control everything in this tale, and his wife’s desperate determination to obey everything he says in order to prove her love, results in extreme horror and disgust.

Finally, in story number three, Stone and Plemmons play members of a cult that have been asked to find a woman foretold to possess the power to revive the dead. This creepy cult, with Dafoe as the leader, insists on its followers being pure, “uncontaminated” by outside elements. Once again, people are being dominated by an authority, in this case the cult. And the person they want to resurrect from the dead? You guessed it: RMF.

The film is maniacally focused on this issue of authority, and the distortions that people go through in relationship to it. There are many disturbing things symbolized, but of course rather than explaining anything, Lanthimos leaves it all out for us to untangle. Who is RMF? Why is everyone afraid of freedom? Even though there is an occasional strained sense of humor, Kinds of Kindness is more than anything else, terrifying. The world Lanthimos presents is not at all one of kindness, but of violence. It’s a dark vision for our times—not for the faint hearted.