I Just Saw

I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and neurotic people in a modern world where warmer feelings have been leached out. Kinds of Kindness is an absurdist comedy with humour as dark as a night in the mines, reminiscent here and there of the surrealist director David Lynch.

It probably isn’t for a lot of general moviegoers partly because it’s a film that doesn’t do much of the legwork with regards to meaning and intent for you, in fact not much at all, but perhaps largely because it’s so unrelievedly bleak, cruel, and cynical, with no major characters that are likeable or even charming really. The three stories star Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Defoe in varied combinations of relationships with each other and playing different characters each time. The effect is a bit like watching cells break apart and coalesce under a microscope, which I think is an apt description of Lanthimos’ narrative approach here. His two prior films, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), were historical dramas which although highly stylised and tied to the director’s particular vision, presented more in the way of three-act stories with clear goals.

Kinds of Kindness, on the other hand, is Lanthimos unmoored from considerations of closure and clarity or, well, kindness. Even when truly dreadful things happen to the characters – like self-harm, dismemberment, and date rape – they don’t grow or change or become kinder people as a result. Almost all of them are utterly selfish, manipulative, sometimes pathetic, sometimes controlling. The first story sees Plemons as a man whose life is dictated to the finest detail – from what he eats and what he reads to whether or not he has children – by his employer (Defoe). The second casts Plemons as a man whose wife (Stone) returns from an ill-fated boat trip and seems like a different person. The third forefronts Stone as a cultist seeking a prophesied woman who can bring people back from the dead. The stories are linked by a non-speaking (as I recall) character called RMF, an older man tangentially connected to the main players’ lives and sometimes used as a pawn by them.

The third is my favourite story, which is the one with the most narrative propulsion, mystery, and suspense. It also ends on a note so incredibly cynical it’s like the ending of a conte cruel or tale of the unexpected. The second story is the next best in my ranking, with a weird and compelling monologue by Stone about an Isle of Dogs that leads to an amusing end-credits sequence. The first story is good, but more of an aperitif for what follows.

The film opens with a perfect opening song choice: “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, which contains the lyrics: “Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.” If you find yourself struggling to understand Kinds of Kindness, that’s its thesis right there.

Rating: 3/4