By Robert Moran
Kinds of Kindness ★★
(MA) 164 minutes
Barely six months since he got Emma Stone to act like a sex-obsessed baby in Poor Things (and to Oscars glory at that), Yorgos Lanthimos – the Greek Weird Wave’s reigning figurehead – returns with Kinds of Kindness, another wacky collaboration with the jewel in his crown. If Poor Things was the main meal, Kinds of Kindness is the offcuts.
Emma Stone returns in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness.Credit: Yorgos Lanthimos
In interviews, Stone has said the troupe – including Lanthimos regular Willem Dafoe and new addition Jesse Plemons – jumped straight into making Kinds of Kindness before Poor Things was even released, out of fear that the weirdness of the earlier film would inhibit Lanthimos from ever securing funding to make another movie again.
I mean, please: the overwhelming institutional thumbs up for Poor Things (it won 92 awards from 248 nominations at festivals across the globe) proves these people severely overstate their supposed transgressions, a Lanthimos staple since the beginning.
Lanthimos’ fifth collaboration with co-writer Efthimis Filippou – following their international breakthroughs Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015) and their last work together, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – Kinds of Kindness is that ultimate cinematic wank-job, an “anthology”: three stories whose only overlap is some bald guy named “R.M.F.”, a mysterious figure who barely qualifies as a MacGuffin let alone a connecting thread.
In the first part, titled The Death of R.M.F, Plemons plays a nervy corporate stooge who lives to take orders from his authoritarian boss (Dafoe). In the second, titled R.M.F is Flying, Plemons is a buttoned-up cop who grows increasingly suspicious that his wife (Stone) – long missing at sea, and recently discovered – is the real deal. And in the third, titled R.M.F Eats a Sandwich, Stone and Plemons team up as a sort of new-age Scully and Mulder on the search for a magical twin who can reanimate the dead at the behest of their cult’s leaders, played by Dafoe and Hong Chau.
Stone and Jesse Plemons take on multiple roles in Lanthimos’ triptych. Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
Beyond, say, Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), anthology films are a tough sell. Without any narrative thrust to engage our attention across its punishing two-hour, 44-minute runtime, it’s left to Lanthimos’ typically outlandish set-ups and some committed (if foolhardy) performances to do the grunt work.
Alongside Stone and Dafoe, all the regular Lanthimos suspects are here in recurring bit parts, including Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn in his usual screen guise as a charisma black hole. Plemons, who won the best actor prize at Cannes in May for his various performances here, might be the new kid on Lanthimos’ set but he’s impressive enough in his shapeshifting, going from playful and meek to paranoid and aggressive across the three stories.
Still, it’s telling that in over two hours of screen time, he barely gets anywhere near something as memorable as his best performance this year – his maniacal patriot in Alex Garland’s Civil War – and he only needed a five-minute cameo to achieve it in that one.
Apart from the third segment, which follows Stone and Plemons through a sort of gothic tropicalia gleaned through oversaturated graininess, Robbie Ryan’s generally dynamic cinematography is also muted here. There’s not much of the fish-eyed looseness he previously brought to Lanthimos’ films, where at least style buoyed the lack of substance.
Lanthimos completists could turn themselves into pretzels searching for the ever-elusive point to his films, when their depth’s as thin as baby’s spittle. His films with Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, for example, feel like excuses for toffs to over-enunciate the c-word as though it’s the height of onscreen mischief. Lanthimos’ better films (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) at least coax you into relenting to their strange rhythms, but in Kinds of Kindness, any opportunity to invest is barbed by its triptych nature.
Lanthimos’ so-called absurdist humour is as cloyingly cute as ever, the kind of thing that might convince festival dorks to titter. His relationship to sex remains perversely juvenile: it’s always a tee-hee gag to titillate middlebrow sensibilities through silly provocation.
The same is true of Kinds of Kindness′ self-satisfied body horror – unless it’s been your dream to see Emma Stone de-liver herself for no reason. (To be fair, I did laugh once: when a subtle camera pan suddenly revealed a sombre Willem Dafoe wearing knee-length denim shorts. Lanthimos, at least, knows how to deadpan.)
For a filmmaker who’s yet to give us an honest frame in his life, Kinds of Kindness is nothing if not consistent. Not bold enough to be exciting, not bad enough to be interesting, it’s a slog for all but the most devoted. At this point, you wonder: how much longer can he convince Emma Stone to cosign his embarrassing nonsense?
Kinds of Kindness is out in cinemas on Thursday.
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