Kinds of Kindness – An Absurdist Return To Form (Early Review)

If there’s one 21st-century director whose ascent into Academy Award glory was unexpected, it would be Yorgos Lanthimos. This isn’t due to any lack of quality in his films but rather because shock and unrelenting cruelty are fundamental elements of Lanthimos’ work. Whether he’s exploring cosmic punishment in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, deconstructing the social constructs of love in The Lobster, or displaying the most distorted version of childhood socialization in Dogtooth, his earlier films were often defined by putting his characters through extreme emotional trauma.

In his Greek-language works (Dogtooth and The Alps), the films felt like endurance tests where the dramatic elements often fell flat because the characters lacked interiority and operated more like vessels for Lanthimos to get his point across. By the time of his English debut (The Lobster), he still fell into similar trappings, but the intentional one-dimensionality and lighter subject matter allowed the comedy to sing louder than before—it’s his funniest and best film for this reason. Lanthimos is a director who loves dipping into nihilistic absurdity, inserting misplaced jokes alongside the genuine dread the film carries at that point; like a god subsiding empathy for a minute to laugh at his playthings. This is Lanthimos’ style.

Over the past few years, however, it is fair to state that Lanthimos has begun casting his protagonists in a more sensitive light and has loosened up in terms of creating “feel bad” pieces of work. This shift has garnered him considerable Academy Award acclaim for his Emma Stone collaborations, The Favourite and last year’s Poor Things—although it’s unfair to claim these films are compromised or any less idiosyncratic. After all, the latter was considered one of the director’s most accessible films, and that’s still a film where a corpse’s eye sockets are repeatedly stabbed with scissors within the first ten minutes. But maybe a heart and some warmth were starting to show.

So, after six years of “playing nice,” Lanthimos arrives with his latest, Kinds of Kindness: an anthology that feels like a deliberate middle finger to the Oscar acclaim the director has garnered in recent years. The film marks a return to form that is arguably more abrasive, uncomfortable, and elusive than anything in his English-speaking filmography. It’s his most shocking picture since Dogtooth, but with a disarming amount of elegance (beautifully shot by The Favourite and Poor Things cinematographer, Robbie Ryan) and the aided maturity in character writing developed over years of collaboration with screenwriter Tony McNamara; although it isn’t a film anyone would describe as having warmth. In a filmography of blunt repetition, Kinds of Kindness stands out and benefits from its anthology structure—the narrative shifts lend a looseness more than ever before, while also showcasing considerable restraint in how minimally the plot is delivered. Once the audience starts piecing together each story, the results are unpredictable, upsetting, surreal, sardonic, cryptic, very, very funny, and perhaps some of the director’s greatest works yet.

At first glance, thematically, the film seems most similar to The Lobster as another deconstruction of the social practices of love and the extent we’ll go to be loved by another. There are three stories featuring the same party of actors, and although none of the stories interconnect, there are many similarities throughout, including the actors’ roles: Plemons is always vulnerable and unhappy, Stone is vibrant, unpredictable, and capable, and Dafoe always occupies a charming authorial position. The first story features Plemons playing a man desperate to win back the approval of his boss (the excellent and versatile Dafoe) after declining to follow through with a very violent, very silly request. The next story is also Plemons-led and revolves around a man’s wife (Stone) returning home after a long disappearance and showing enough subtle differences that convince Plemons she’s an imposter. The final story is the most narrative-heavy and features a woman (Stone) who leaves her husband and daughter to join a sex cult and is tasked with seeking a prophesied healer who can raise the dead.

On paper, the humour might seem missing, but it’s through the unravelling of events and the filmmaking itself that the humour (and shock) begins to reveal itself. Without spoilers, this has, bar none, some of the funniest and most unexpected imagery seen in a Lanthimos film. The teaser of Emma Stone shaking her ass next to someone unconscious in a wheelchair doesn’t even scratch the top three most jarring images in Kinds of Kindness. Throughout, the score provided by Jerskin Fendrix, with its surprising and initially effective hard-hitting piano hits and violin scratches, eventually becomes a parody, gleefully foreshadowing the dark turn that’s about to come, another component of the humour present in other Lanthimos films.

Although some may point to the actors’ unnatural delivery of dialogue as a bug, the technique has never felt more concrete here: these quirks have formed themselves into a recognized style that it seems actors are fully dialled into and come ready for (like an evil version of a Wes Anderson acting troupe where the film’s cruelty and comedy knobs are shifted to opposite scales). The performances on display have awkward pauses, performers begin new lines of dialogue the millisecond after the last one has finished, and they stumble appropriately for the comedy. It’s always exciting and refreshing to see performers flex their acting muscles outside of realism and commit to bizarre, fearless creative swings like these. If Mark Ruffalo’s Oscar nomination for Poor Things is any indication of an Academy Awards that’s becoming more open-minded, there’s a good chance any one of these actors could secure a nomination for their tremendous, varied work.

A return to form that is designed to be one of Yorgos Lanthimos’ most divisive films yet, Kinds of Kindness stands among the director’s best and most accomplished works. Continuing to craft worlds and scenarios that are wholly unique to Lanthimos, the film is a hilarious shock to the senses that continues to prove his skill set is best when operating as a full-blown absurdist. Truly original and never boring, the three narratives inside are patient to open up and play their cards, never allowing the film to grow stale.

There are too many connective tissues between narratives and reprised casting choices to make any conclusive hypotheses on a first watch, but Kinds of Kindness is a consistent experience that will keep the audience guessing long after the film is over.

still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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J.A. Birney

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