Kinds Of Kindness

Wednesday, 24 July 2024, 8:18 am
Article: Howard Davis

The films of Yorgos Lanthimos are certainly not for the faint of heart. Mining the same vein of macabre visuals and mordant, disturbing humour, they follow in a direct line of descent from the three great Davids of modern American film making - Lynch, Cronenberg, and Fincher. Kinds Of Kindness is no exception.

Loosely linked by a nihilistic issues of power, control, and exploitation and a dissonant piano score by Jerskin Fendrix (who contributes a brief cameo in a hotel bar), it is a macabre, absurd, and ultimately unwieldy triptych of three fantastic stories, all starring the same cast members. The three tall tales involve an employee who rebels against his overbearing boss’ weirdly intimate form of tyranny, a police officer who suspects his marine-biologist wife, returning home after months of being stranded on a desert island, has been replaced by a double, and two cult members searching for a young woman thought to possess powers of resurrection.

Lanthimos’ follow-up to his visually stunning Poor Things offers very little in the way of kindness, but bucketloads of cruelty. Among the most disturbing sequences are a scene in which Jesse Plemons encourages Emma Stone to cut off her thumb and excise her liver to the extent of sanguination and a brief foursome shot as a home movie. After the film’s premiere at Cannes, Lanthimos indicated that the depraved Roman emperor Caligula had sparked his original concept - “My inspiration was reading about Caligula and thinking how a man can have such power over other people. So I started to imagine how, in our modern world, it would be if someone had such complete control over others, deciding when they eat and who they marry.” He went on to defend this vision by observing that the real world is “crazy and sad a lot of times … Don’t you think that something is off with the world? Probably more so than with the films that I make … It is also ridiculous and funny and so that needs to be part of what we make.”

Lanthimos’ repertory casting of the same actors reappearing in differing guises and disguises provides much of the movie’s eerie effect that derives mostly from repeatedly showing the same awful things happen to the same sort of deeply disturbed people. Plemons is consistently stolid, blank, and unhappy, Stone’s strangely exophthalmic features sometimes suggest a fierce capability, at others a vulnerable sexuality, while Willem Dafoe is reliably grotesque in his twin turns as sociopathic businessman and cult leader, two charismatic authority figures who both relish getting decked out in some of the most absurd wardrobe choices imaginable.

Wallowing in such grand guignol affectations as cannibalism, auto-amputation, obsession, and self-delusion, Kinds of Kindness returns to the surreal cruelty and bizarre logic of The Lobster’s twisted familial relationships. Lanthimos is clearly fascinated by exploring the idea of total control and subjugation of free will, which is also the central theme of Dogtooth, his brilliantly uncomfortable breakthrough picture, in which a domineering father raises his three adult children as unwitting prisoners in the family compound by creating an intricate mythology about the perils of the world beyond its boundaries. A similar obsession with emotional and psychological manipulation loosely connects the three episodes of Kinds of Kindness and much of its emotional aridity derives from closely observing an indifferent and decidedly off-kilter universe imbued with suggestions of paranoid conspiracy theory. 

This theme is most apparent in the first narrative section, titled The Death Of RMF, which alludes to the initials of the only character to show up in all three stories - a lugubrious, hirsute, and entirely silent character glumly played by Yorgos Stefanakos. Plemons brings a fretful discomfort to the role of Robert, having spent the past decade in an all-consuming contract with his boss and sometime lover Raymond, who dictates all his decisions for him (including the clothes he wears, how often he gets his hair cut, his choice of wife, and the frequency with which they have sex) via instructions in a daily handwritten note. Dafoe’s overbearing business executive even provides Plemons’ unhappy underling with precise instructions on what he can and can’t eat - “Because there’s nothing more ridiculous than skinniness on a man.”

But when Robert refuses one of Raymond’s more extreme requests, Raymond abruptly severs the relationship and takes back his lavish presents of collectible sporting memorabilia. Robert’s life implodes after he confesses all this to his wife, who is understandably furious about his deception and spineless acquiescence to Raymond’s demands, not to mention the loss of her “favourite” of all Raymond’s gifts, a broken tennis racket busted up by John McEnroe. Robert’s desperate efforts to claw his way back into Raymond’s affections only increase when he starts to suspect he’s been replaced by Rita (Stone).

Plemons and Stone are reunited in the second section (titled RMF is Flying), this time as a cop whose mental health has hit a decidedly rough patch. But Plemon’s initial relief at his missing wife’s return soon turns sour as he begins to wonder whether the woman who has survived her desert island ordeal is actually his wife at all. The aspect of control in this section stems from his insistence that she prove her true identity and manifests itself in some robustly grisly elements of shock and horror. The third chapter (RMF Eats A Sandwich) follows a pair of doomsday sect members as they search for the prophesied woman who can raise the dead, while simultaneously jostling for the affections of Dafoe’s toxic cult leader who makes impossible demands on his followers, rewarding absolute submission with neatly apportioned allocations of sex and purified water.

Having collaborated with screenwriter Tony McNamara on his two previous films, here Lanthimos has reunited with his long-term creative partner Efthimis Filippou, with whom he co-wrote all his other movies. As in those previous collaborations, Kinds of Kindness is unapologetic in its eerie ambiguity and unrelenting oddness and Fendrix’ score is admirably daring, combining isolated atonal notes on the piano with portentously inappropriate choral interludes.

Although it was shot in New Orleans, the generic urban anonymity of Kinds of Kindness supplants the vivid worlds created in his previous pictures, but lacks the stylistic visual onslaught that oiled the highly peculiar machinations of Poor Things. Even though the movie is sporadically funny, it remains an affectless, mannered, and overlong endurance test, inevitably drawing comparisons between the on-screen power trips and Lanthimos’ singular approach to film-making. Directing movies not involves exerting strict dictatorial control over a crew of highly skilled professionals, but also deliberately manipulating and often misleading the audience. As David Fincher told me while working together on Seven - “I just want to fuck with their minds.” With Lanthimos, we’re required to trust a film-maker who seems intent on testing our personal limits of patience and tolerance for self-inflicted masochism. This recurring interest in depicting states of kinky selfishness, deep delusion, and chronic despair is effectively a kind of unkindness.

It’s similarly unsettling to witness the same images and motifs (including overeating undercooked meat, water, blood, and chocolate) crop up as recurrent tropes. There are hospitals, ambulances, and police stations - all locations populated by people who suffer from an unhappy submission to authority. The lead characters repeatedly try to prove both their love and loyalty by submitting to abuse and coercive control, while women get pregnant and have miscarriages. There are recurring dreams whose contents are unsettlingly duplicated in waking life, as well as lots of creepy sex governed by characters who both literally and figuratively intoxicate each other and a surfeit of unconscious naked women, while the main men are all despicable manipulators. Doubled characters and twins, cuts, lacerations, and self-harm all contribute to this sense of queasy unease and disquieting suspense.

This is an emotionally arid world that only superficially resembles normality. Like Stone’s marine-biologist character, it seems to have been replaced with a near-perfect facsimile by some unseen, malignant hand. This surreal sense of uncanny coincidence isn’t exactly the same as that displayed in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (which provided a much more recognisably human array of situations), nor is it quite like the ensemble effect of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (although Plemons’ cop shares the same baffled, morose quality as John C Reilly’s police officer). Cinematically, the movie is extremely elegant, but there’s little substance to complement the visual style. As one reviewer commented, perhaps the devastating effects of absence and loss are also part of whatever esoteric and enigmatic point Lanthimos seems obsessed with investigating.

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz