Last fall, a few weeks after watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things in theaters, I attended a screening of Dogtooth, the director’s breakout film from 2009. Lanthimos’s movies are often considered comedies—perhaps for lack of an identifiable genre—and in both theaters, the audiences frequently laughed, though the tenor of our laughter could not have been any more different. Poor Things is firmly a comedy. It follows the deceased Bella Baxter through a tour of steampunk Portugal as she reads the classics and frees herself from a buffoonish lover. Dogtooth is harder to pin down. It is a cruel film centered on a family of five—two parents and their three adult children—who live in a secluded compound in rural Greece, where only the patriarch is able to leave. If this doesn’t sound funny, that’s because it isn’t, but in Dogtooth, as with many of his movies, Lanthimos creates discomfort so tense that the only way to release it is to laugh. This is especially true of his newest film, Kinds of Kindness, a grim and brilliant triptych of contemporary fables.
Kinds of Kindness will seem like a departure—perhaps a betrayal—to viewers who fell in love with the director’s two most popular movies, The Favourite and Poor Things. Both films were co-written with Tony McNamara; with Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos reunites with Efthimis Filippou, co-writer of Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Lobster. Though the movie wrestles with many of the themes that made his earlier movies difficult to endure—cruelty, nihilism, control, isolation—it marks a step forward for Lanthimos. It is his most curiously metaphysical film, populated with dunderheaded acolytes and their beguiling leaders. Lanthimos is up to something more nuanced than “monotonous miseries,” as other reviews have claimed. With Kinds of Kindness, he identifies how the fog of fascism has painstakingly saturated the most mundane aspects of contemporary life.
The first section of the film, “The Death of R.M.F.,” is a slow-burning parable about control and autonomy. Jesse Plemons’s Robert is an executive at a nondescript construction firm who receives daily instructions from his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), indicating what to wear and eat and when to make love to his wife. Robert is reading Anna Karenina at Raymond’s behest. Robert and his wife do not have children, because Raymond decided they wouldn’t. When Robert fails to cause a fatal car accident—and refuses to attempt another crash—Raymond revokes many of the things he has bestowed on Robert: his job, his wife, Raymond’s affection.
Plemons effortlessly conveys what is most pathetic and tender about Robert, a desperate, befuddled man who crumbles under the weight of making decisions. In a brief comic scene at a bar, a spiraling Robert can’t fathom choosing a drink for himself, and makes the bartender decide. Robert resembles a worn-down counterpoint to Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (Lanthimos even overlays a soft and haunting piano score reminiscent of the Kubrick film). Whereas Harford flouts the rules of the ultra-wealthy elites and discovers, with horror, the many machinations of the one percent, Robert finds purpose in accepting such machinations.
Fifteen years ago, Dogtooth offered a bleak portrait of a patriarchal father and the fascistic demands he imposes on his family. In it, the eldest daughter risks her life to flee her family, whereas Robert risks his to satisfy Raymond. Lanthimos’s stance on control hasn’t softened over the years. Rather, with Kinds of Kindness, the director explores something more insidious than the danger of control—the enthusiastic submission to another person’s control. There is nothing sexy or kinky about this kind of capitulation; there is no power in Robert’s submission. This is abundantly clear at the end of this story. After Robert finds his way back to Raymond’s embrace—by abandoning his moral convictions—it is Raymond who takes credit for the younger man’s efforts.
Lanthimos builds on this theme in the film’s final installment, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.” In it, Emma Stone plays Emily, a harried missionary for an isolated sex cult led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau). Emily and Andrew (Plemons) are on the hunt for the cult’s savior, a woman who, according to a rather specific prophecy, can raise the dead. They are looking for a twin whose sister has died, a woman of a particular height and weight, with breasts a certain distance apart (Emily carries measuring tape). She and Andrew are essentially casting agents, spending their nights in a run-down motel between interviews with young women eager to snag the role of the prophet.
Stone’s roles in The Favourite and Poor Things gave her space to showcase her charm and gravity, but as Emily, she is more repressed and tense, speaking with a surreal mix of precision and generality—the sort of dialogue unique to the director’s earlier films written with Filippou. In those films, characters speak with a blunt, discomfiting candor that rarely aspires to verisimilitude. The dialogue is so direct that it tends toward the uncanny. His characters are civilized without being socialized, clinging to formal cadence while ignoring conventional boundaries. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for instance, a father calmly tells his nine-year-old son a traumatic story about masturbating his father, in an effort to convince the boy to share a secret of his own. “Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there is,” Raymond tells Robert in “The Death of R.M.F.” Emily warns her daughter to stay away from her father because his sperm is 90 percent water (and thus tainted, according to Omi and Aka).
Lanthimos is highly attuned to how irrational rules—made rational through repetition—come to shape human relationships. His characters rarely waver in their convictions. In earlier films, conflict arose when characters questioned, and eventually broke, these irrational rules. In Kinds of Kindness, however, conflict emerges from characters’ failure to perfectly follow the rules, often for reasons outside their control. In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Emily is ousted from the cult after her husband assaults her (she is deemed contaminated by his sperm). Like Robert, she becomes manipulative and driven out of desperation to return to the life she once knew. She harms a stray dog in order to get close to a veterinarian (Margaret Qualley) whom she believes is the cult’s savior. Emily’s is a cautionary tale of hubris—Lanthimos suggests this in the opening scene, when Emily remarks on a savior candidate’s lack of humility. She is a reckless acolyte who fails to protect the woman she intends to deliver to Omi and Aka.
As bookends for the film, Emily and Robert appear to be in direct conversation. Though Robert ultimately succeeds, recovering the structure he desires, it would be wrong to say that he ends his arc in a place of emotional safety—or that he is better off than Emily. Each character suffers the consequences of receiving what they’ve worked so hard to achieve. Robert, however, believes he has transcended his misfortune; Emily might be lucky, for hers is painfully obvious.
The film’s second section, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” centers on Plemons’s Daniel, a small-town cop whose wife, Liz (Stone), has disappeared on a research trip. When Liz returns home, Daniel isn’t convinced that she’s the same woman. “R.M.F is Flying” is both the most gruesome of the three stories and the most intentionally comedic. In one scene, Daniel fakes tears in order to convince two friends to rewatch a sex tape they made before Liz disappeared. Liz shares a dream where dogs and people have swapped places. At one point, Daniel tells his “best friend” Neil (Mamoudou Athie) that he knows Liz is an imposter because she picked incorrectly when he asked her to play his favorite song. Daniel’s convictions might appear absurd, or like that of a teenager—what self-respecting adult would rank their favorite songs?—but they lay the groundwork for a sadistic and paranoid pursuit of what he believes is the truth.
As Daniel loses touch with reality, he repeatedly makes Liz prove she is who she says. He asks her—in a disarmingly gentle tone—to sauté him a meal of cauliflower and one of her fingers. Here, Liz mirrors Robert, committed to meeting the self-annihilating whims of a man losing his mind. Daniel’s demands only intensify, culminating in a grisly, predictable ending muddled by a false moment of grace. “R.M.F. is Flying” is the weakest of the three stories, hampered by rote domestic cruelty that fails to reach the full depth of Lanthimos’s imagination.
Kinds of Kindness is not an easy film to watch. The fleeting moments of humor—a black-and-white montage of a world where the dogs and humans have swapped roles, Robert’s pitiful effort ordering drinks—are crowded out by the director’s interest in control and desperation. Lanthimos likes to linger on moments of violence and abuse, though it wouldn't be right to say that he revels in the violence he portrays. Rather, he is curious about it—like a child poking the innards of a bug they have squashed—and obsessed with how people rationalize their misdeeds. Poor Things might be a kinder and funnier film, but Kinds of Kindness is more compelling and unsentimental—and better. It isn’t invested in pleasing its audience or making them laugh. This is its own kind of kindness, the rare film that refuses to pander, a film that invites us to laugh whenever we like, even in the absence of jokes.
