Film Review: With ‘Kinds of Kindness,’ Yorgos Lanthimos gets back to the nasty basics

With his past two feature films, Yorgos Lanthimos has found a fruitful creative partnership with writer Tony McNamara. That partnership thus far has delivered “The Favourite” in 2018 and “Poor Things” just last year, both lauded by the Academy and both with a slightly more whimsical nature than Lanthimos’ previous works. Whimsical as only Lanthimos can do, of course – so still with a certain amount of bite.

While both those films have their fair share of darkness and weirdness, they are also slightly more friendly to the mainstream than Lanthimos’ previous work, perhaps earning him the opportunity to engage with a wider audience. But if those are the only Lanthimos films you’ve seen up until this point, “Kinds of Kindness” might come as a bit of a shock – where “Poor Things” and “The Favourite” invite you into their oddness, Lanthimos’ new anthology feels more like a slap in the face.

For “Kinds of Kindness,” Lanthimos has teamed up with co-writer Efthimis Filipou, with whom he wrote films like “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” – the more corrosive, spiteful (and in a lot of ways, funnier) side of Lanthimos’ filmography. Like those films, “Kinds of Kindness” is interested in the nastier side of humanity, and interested in exploring the lengths to which we’ll go to convince ourselves we’re doing the right thing as we unleash inexcusable cruelty.

“Kinds of Kindness” is broken into three separate, loosely connected films, all involving a peripheral character named R.M.F., and all with the same actors playing different roles. One of the central concepts that connects the three films – one about a man and his domineering boss, one about distrust growing between a married couple, and one about a woman shunned from the cult she calls home – is control. In the first story, “The Death of R.M.F,” we meet Robert (Jesse Plemons), a man who lives under the thumb of his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Raymond controls every single thing that Robert does, from what he wears, to what he eats, to who he marries. The game has gone so far that Robert, who Raymond will not allow to have children, has been secretly poisoning his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) so that she can’t get pregnant.

The theme of control is very obviously baked into this narrative, but far more interesting is the equal amounts of contempt and sympathy Lanthimos seems to have for the darker side of humanity. When Robert refuses to try and kill a man for the second time at Raymond’s request (he already tried once, but was unsuccessful), Raymond leaves him to fend for himself. But after years of this relationship, Robert is unable to make any sort of decision on his own. After what Robert has done, we should (and we do) find him deserving of our judgment. But there’s also a healthy sense of pity and sorrow – in a way, it’s agonizing to watch Robert agonize over choices as small as what to order at a bar, to watch him wonder if refusing to commit murder was the right choice.

As different characters throughout the three mini movies, Plemons is more affected than he has ever been, simply by virtue of molding himself to the Lanthimos’ style – which, while still deadpan at times, feels a little more emotive in “Kinds of Kindness” than it has in the past. He and Emma Stone form the bookend main characters of this trilogy, with the story in the middle functioning as a faceoff between the two. In that second story, “R.M.F. is Flying,” Stone plays Liz, a scientist who goes missing at sea. After Liz is discovered, she reluctantly admits where she was stranded, delivering a ludicrous monologue with utter sincerity. Both Stone and Plemons deliver Lanthimos’ stilted dialogue perfectly, bringing the type of seriousness needed to bolster the film’s absurdism, the type of earnestness that creates humor and discomfort in spades.

Despite its name, throughout “Kinds of Kindness,” people do terrible things. There are kidnappings, assaults, murders and cruelty all over the place. Terrible acts culminate in the most extreme version of selfishness, each character excusing their crimes in the name of believing themselves to be right – and, despite the absurdity of it all, isn’t that so very human? In “R.M.F. is Flying,” Liz’s husband Daniel (Plemons) decides he can no longer trust his wife after she returns from her disappearance. He turns against her, and as she tries to appease his distrust a harrowing game of chicken unfolds between the two of them, both staunch in their approach and their beliefs.

The second story is perhaps the most emblematic of the boldest choice in “Kinds of Kindness” – all of the terrible choices, all of the nasty work, is usually vindicated in some way by the story’s end. In the world Lanthimos has created, he zeroes in on the most depraved parts of us, but by implying that depravity might have a place, might be rooted in some horrible truth, he reaches a place of deeper complexity by film’s end.

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