Summary
Lanthimos delivers of a triptych of his idiosyncratic weirdness, assembling his troupe of actors to do what they do best.
Fresh off the back of the award-winning Poor Things, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos maintains his reputation as a purveyor of abstract absurdities. Using his rapidly developing repertory cast, and his regular collaborative screener Efthimis Filippou, KINDS OF KINDNESS is a triptych of tales that are connected by dreams and a man named R.M.F. Or maybe they aren’t connected at all.
In the opening story, The Death of R.M.F, executive office worker Robert (Jesse Plemons) and his wife Sarah (Hong Chou) live their days under the strict instructions of Robert’s boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Things take a turn when Robert tries to live his own life, and encounters Rita (Emma Stone), who seems to have taken the path Robert could not.
In the second part R.M.F. is Flying, cop Daniel (Plemons) struggles after his wife Liz (Stone) goes missing at sea. However, when Liz returns he is convinced that she is an imposter and his behaviour grows increasingly erratic. In the final part, R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich, Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are agents for cult leader Omi (Dafoe), who is on a mission to find a person with the ability to resurrect the dead.
There’s a twin danger for Lanthimos going into KINDS OF KINDNESS, his ninth feature as a director. Anthologies are always a dicey affair, with the best stories often overshadowing the least and vice versa. The other is the danger of falling into an expectation for weirdness that he can never hope to meet now that his audience is a little larger. Lanthimos manages to narrowly avoid both of them this time though, giving his little troupe of actors all the excuses they need to just play. All three stories work incredibly well on their own merits, and only the second one leans a little too close to the Twilight Zone.
Plemons is the revelation here, completely disappearing into each of his three characters to the point you forget he was ever anything else. At this point, Dafoe and Stone’s respective brands of weird slip so effortlessly into their three roles it seems perfectly natural. So, it’s Plemons, Chou and Margaret Qualley who get their freak on in the very best way here.
It will be really interesting to see if these twisted tales stand up to repeat viewings. The second and third stories in particular land on such singular points of semi-shock that it will be almost impossible to replicate them. At any rate, we’ll get little time to ponder it: Lanthimos is already working on Bugonia, a reworking of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! You’ll never guess who’s in the cast.
Coppola’s willingness to experiment on a scale this grand after sixty years of making films is something I continue to admire, especially in a film that combines the canvas of a blockbuster with the intimacy of live installation art. It’s a film that is both unabashedly optimistic and deeply critical of modern empires. It is a contradiction and a reconcilement. It is, in short, MEGALOPOLIS. If this is his swan song then it is surely one for the greatest hits package.
2024 | USA, UK, Ireland | DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos | WRITER: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou | CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafen | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2024, Searchlight Pictures/Disney | RUNNING TIME: 165 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 5-16 June 2024 (SFF 2024)
