I decided to take a chance with the new Yorgos Lanthimos movie. I did really enjoy last winter’s Poor Things, but honestly, there are two types of Lanthimos movies. There are the bizarre ones like Poor Things and The Favourite where everything is over-the-top but characters at least show emotions, and then there’s the ones like The Killing of the Sacred Deer or The Lobster where the movie has a normal-looking environment and is set in what looks like the real world but all the actors speak in a robotic monotone for some reason. What would Kinds of Kindness be? I was mostly hoping that it would be more like the former group, but it was closer to the latter.
OK, the characters weren’t quite so robotic, but it was still a Lathimos movie, and as such, it is very weird.
The best way to understand Kinds of Kindness without saying too much to give away the movie, the 2 hour and 44 minute movie is divided into three segments, all with a title relating to the one character that appears in each story, a silent fellow known only as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos). At the end of the segment, a cast list appears to say which actors played which of the main characters for the segment, and then the movie goes on to the next one or the closing credits. If R.M.F. is the same guy in every segment, then the segments are not in chronological order, but it doesn’t really matter. The main cast –Jesse Plemmons, Emma Stone, Willem Defoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie–play different characters in each segment, often with very different looks and styles. Said characters are somewhat robotic in their delivery but not as much as I saw in, say, The Lobster.
As for the plot, the first segment (“The Death of R.M.F.”) is about a man who allows his employer to make every decision for him until one day, the man won’t do something his boss wanted and is let go after ten years of service. The second (“R.M.F. if Flying”) is about a man who thinks that, after his wife was rescued from a shipwreck, is convinced she is not his wife due to some minor differences. And finally, the third segment (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”) has a woman looking desperately for a special person because of some bizarre water-based cult she belongs to. That is the best way I can think of to describe each segment without giving too much of anything away.
Now, I consider myself a fairly smart person. I don’t claim to be brilliant or anything, but I think I am pretty smart. And honestly, I didn’t know what to make of this one. I learned later it was supposed to be about people and how they feel the need to connect to others, and that makes sense. The first and third segments, especially, are about people who are desperate to reconnect with someone after a rejection. The second segment? It’s there but not as obvious. My understanding is Lanthimos’s movies are sometimes set up to seem more mythic than realistic. The stories are fables, fanciful and weird. But that doesn’t mean I really can get into them when they do the monotone performances. Sure, an actor of the caliber of Jesse Plemmons can actually do the monotone and still project emotions in interesting ways, but these movies are just weird and baffling.
If anything, I get the impression Lanthimos has three ideas, but none of them quite long enough to justify a single movie on their own. If anything, the first two segments more or less worked for me. It was the third and final one where the concept started to wear thin for me, something that wasn’t helped by the movie’s long runtime. Lanthimos still has his moments strewn throughout the movie to be, I am sure, off-putting. That could be characters watching their fourway homemade porn, a sister willing to do anything so her twin can fulfill some cult’s prophecy for some reason, or even just a close-up of Stone’s and Defoe’s mouths as they make out. Even a joke that could be just funny, a montage of a world where dogs and humans essentially switched places, starts off well enough showing dogs driving cars and hanging out, but then tosses in some more disturbing images of things dogs might do if they were the humans of their world. I think this movie works better for Lanthimos fans, and I am not that guy.
Grade: C+
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