
This was one of the less disturbing posters
dir: Yorgos Lanthimos
2024
If Poor Things seemed like an attempt from a mercurial director to make something somehow crowd-pleasing and popular, Kinds of Kindness is a reminder that what this director really enjoys doing is making audiences feel very uncomfortable.
He has a knack for it. Kinds of Kindness is a long arse movie, mostly because it’s three movies standing on each other’s shoulders under a coat pretending to be one movie. The three stories have all the same actors, mostly, playing completely different roles, but they’re only loosely connected.
What are they connected by? It’s not kindness, I can tell you that much for free.
They’re also not connected by R.M.F. Each story has ‘R.M.F.’ in its title, but R.M.F. himself doesn’t even get any dialogue.
“The Death of R.M.F.”, “R.M.F. is Flying” and “R.M.F. eats a sandwich” are each part of this triptych. Those titles are not illuminating, in that they explain neither their point nor their linkage. But they could be evidence that Lanthimos, part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave of cinema, primarily likes fucking with his audience’s heads / expectations.
Who is R.M.F in the first story? He is a guy wearing a monogrammed shirt, who is paid with an envelope of cash, who is meant to be run into by a car (while driving a separate car). In the second he is the helicopter pilot who brings back a marine biologist who was lost at sea. And in the third story, he is a dead person brought back to life, who eats a sandwich, and gets a lot of it on his shirt.
Very messy eater, that R.M.F. Maybe R.M.F stands for Repulsive Mother Fucker?
What’s of absolute greatest importance is that it does not fucking matter, not one bit.
Jesse Plemons plays a guy called Robert in the first story. Robert’s every daily action, for ten years, has been dictated by Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Down to what he eats, wears, and whether he has sex with his wife (Hong Chau). Robert is told by Raymond to, amongst other things, drive into R.M.F so hard that he causes a fatal accident.
For the first time in 10 years, Robert cannot brings himself to do what his master says, and so he loses everything. He also, after having every decision made for him for 10 years, cannot make decisions on his own, and is paralysed by his own newfound freedom. Raymond wants nothing to do with him.
If you have watched Jesse Plemons in other stuff before, you know that him playing a blank sociopath is not a stretch, a reach or anything in any way difficult for him to do. It is very convincing to watch him play a completely empty person who, eventually, realises he will do almost anything in order to be under Raymond’s control once again.
Trademark, ‘classic’ Lanthimos is that Plemons, like most other people throughout these stories, has to deliver everything in a fairly flat manner. That flatness, or a lack of affect, I suspect is really what turns this director on.
Plemons also mostly leads in the second story, this time playing a cop whose wife has gone missing at sea. He is absolutely distraught, but within the flat parameters that Lanthimos requires. He has a cop buddy who’s trying to support him, but sometimes that support goes a little bit too far, like when Daniel, wanting to see his wife again, insists that his buddy (the great Mamoudou Athie) and his wife (Margaret Qualley) watch a video with him that the four of them made back in the day.
You can guess what the content of that video is. I don’t generally imagine myself in the scenarios that I watch in all the movies I watch. Right now, I am imagining myself stab myself several times in order to avoid such a situation as the one that was displayed on that screen.
Even though Daniel himself is convinced he’ll never see his wife again, she returns. But when she isn’t exactly the person he remembers, he becomes convinced that she must be some kind of doppelganger.
There’s a name for that fixation, but let’s not pretend this is a clinical examination of what kind of psychotic break results in a person becoming convinced his wife is not his wife, with violence and horror ensuing. This second story has a deliberately ambiguous ending, which withholds any explanation just to fuck with us further.
It does also give us one of my least favourite plot devices, being someone relaying a dream to someone else. But unlike every other time this happens (except, you know, when Martin Luther King Jnr had a dream that he had to share with everybody), it’s actually quite funny, and results in some hilarious images at the end of that second sequence, where dogs rule the world and we’re just their pets.
Emma Stone plays the marine biologist wife in that second story, but the last story is mostly her running around doing things for her cult.
Stone and Plemons play two cult members who wander around in search of someone the cult is convinced is coming – their messiah will be a woman, she will be a twin whose twin has died, and she will be able to raise the dead. Margaret Qualley plays two sister twins, one of whom might be The Onewho these two lunatics are looking for. But they’re members of a dumb cult (all cults are dumb) that believes in, I dunno, water of questionable hygiene (that the cultists have to drink), which is Jacuzzi water that the cult leaders have cried into.
It is Emma Stone’s turn to deliver all of her lines like if she emotes believably the director will be displeased, and press a button delivering painful shocks either to her or someone she cares about. Her character occasionally travels back to where she used to live with this guy and her daughter, but for her troubles she is drugged and raped by her ex-husband.
See, nothing’s off limits with this guy, and all these actors do everything he says, because they’re just so lucky to be in his edgy films.
What bullshit. The third is what I would refer to as being the most openly blackly comical (these really don’t feel like comedic stories, blackly ironic or otherwise) mostly because it has an ending plainly intended as a fuck you to the whole premise (and the audience, for that matter), especially as it pretends to have a sensible and ‘complete’ resolution, even as it trades in nonsense.
It did make me laugh, though. A queasy, uncomfortable laugh, as befits the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, of course.
Everything is made with a careful, strangling level of control. The soundtrack, when it’s not choirs singing like angry monks, is discordant, unsettling chords played deliberately off-key.
Like we weren’t suitably unsettled as it was? You need to stab us in the ear with a chopstick at random intervals in case we were too comfy?
This whole flick is a lot of something, but I’m not entirely sure of what. It could be darkly clever, it could be a load of old cobblers and bollocks; it could be complicated and uncompromising, or it could be pretentious twaddle.
It’s also two hours and forty minutes, so make of that what you will (it’s so fucking long and exhausting).
Perversely, I ‘enjoyed’ it more than Poor Things, so, again, use that as a signpost of something.
7 times how about you invite a bunch of talented actors and make them play three different awkward characters in a movie but, joke’s on them, you only pay them for the first performance out of 10
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“You’ve lost more weight, I think. Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there is.” – finally, someone speaks their truth - Kinds of Kindness
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