Plinth

After last year’s exceptionally fun Poor Things (based on the 1992 novel by Scottish sci-fi writer, Alasdair Grey), Kinds of Kindness sees Lanthimos return to working with his long-term writing partner Efthimis Filippou. In both his previous two films, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), a kitschy playfulness pervades. Lanthimos creates fantastical dream-like worlds with grandiose sets and elaborate costumes, turning away from his previous style. By contrast, Kinds of Kindness sees a return to a darker, more cynical sentiment.

Rather than one film, Kinds of Kindness is composed of three separate but interrelated stories – all using a rotating cast. The first story sees Willem Defoe and Jesse Plemons as Raymond and Robert, a boss and employee enacting a relationship of extreme control. In the second Plemons plays a depressed cop whose wife returns after going missing, except he believes she has been replaced. He becomes psychotic and then cannibalistic. In the third Emma Stone is part of a sex cult that has forced her to leave her family. She’s searching for a woman from her dream who can bring a corpse back to life. In each part the narrative tension builds to at least one moment of violent climax, with all of the three sections named after an overweight balding with a mullet called ‘R.M.F.’

In the first part of three, as Raymond, Willem Dafoe has excessive control over Robert’s (Jesse Plemons) life. We see Robert being delivered daily cards that dictate when he eats and how long he sleeps with his wife. The reason? Raymond is preparing Robert to murder R.M.F. by running him over. First Robert refuses. Raymond abandons him. The victim desires pleasing his abuser so much that he runs over R.M.F. even when Raymond won’t talk to him. Across glass and chrome panelled offices and wealthy domestic interiors, the story takes the logic of BDSM dynamics and puts them into the daily existence of rich Americans.

The second part sees Plemons playing a police officer whose wife, played by Emma Stone, a research scientist, has gone missing on a trip to a remote island. When she reappears the police officer becomes obsessed by the idea that his wife has been replaced by someone else. He thinks she might be a cannibal. He then goes mad, eating the hand of an arrestee. Dosed up on antipsychotics, he expresses his cannibalistic desire to eat his wife’s thumb and then her liver. She only wants to please him. Both characters are intensely paranoid, destroying each other. It culminates in witnessing something truly awful – yet spectacularly unreal.

In the final section, Emma Stone plays Emily – who has abandoned her family to join a cult – trying to find a woman she saw in a dream to bring a corpse back to life. In its use of purposeful ambiguity, it really tests the viewer’s patience and the use of sexual violence is careless. Having already watched two hours of cruelty, I mostly wanted to leave.

Each of these violent scenes are maximally grotesque – and like horror movies they’re intended to shock. But horror movies have a fantasy character. We know when the lights come on they’re over. Lanthimos can make fantasy films: Poor Things is successful partly because it’s stupid. It only tells us something deep about ourselves if we want it to. By contrast, Kinds of Kindness is overserious but not insightful. It’s as if Lanthimos was trying to tell us cold hard truths with arthouse-style characters holding knives, drenched in fake blood. But the result is more middlebrow Disneyland than it is Michael Haneke – forcing us to enjoy spectacles of cruelty, rather than really setting them up for questioning.

Human history is full of terrible acts. But Lanthimos’s cartoonish cynicism misses out both the non-personal causes of violence, and a belief that things could be otherwise. His characters are violent because they are also all-powerful, while completely emotionally stunted, like mini dictators. He seems to state their real reason for harming others is love. And never hate, or dehumanisation, or inequality. In Lanthimos’s world there is only the cold emptiness at the core of our heart as we keep punishing one another. I don’t believe him.

By Ed Luker