“Kinds of Kindness”, Lanthimos Returns Home

Following the two period films, The Favourite (2018) written by Debrah Davis and Tony McNamara, who would go on to adapt Alasdair Gray‘s novel in Poor Things (2023), Yorgos Lanthimos once again collaborates with playwright and screenwriter Efthimis Filippou. The cooperation that brought the so-called Greek Weird Wave to the top, has once again managed to weave a triptych of chilling and freezing deaf violence anchored in psychological terror. Their joint work in Canine (2009), Alps (2011), Lobster (2015) or in The Sacrifice of a Sacred Deer (2017) finds its continuity and we could say its distillation in Kinds of Kindness (2024), a revealing and (perhaps) falsely ironic title.

Once again, acceptance, loss, submission and free will are the themes that run through the three stories of the 167-minute film, divided into three parts starring the same actors (Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, awarded Best Actor at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Willem Dafoe, Yorgos Stefanakos —in real life, an Athenian notary who is a friend of Lanthimos and Filippou— Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie) who, in different roles, accentuate the singularity and yet the generality of their behaviors in a relational dynamic subject to the constraints of laws accepted in their purest irrationality, but as valid as any consent obtained under an infinite spectrum of social or personal pressure.

The first part, entitled “The Death of R.M.F,” set to the synth-pop hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, shows the submission to which Raymond (Willem Dafoe) subjects his employee Robert (Jesse Plemmons) through daily instructions to which he must obey and be accountable. His life, nestled in a standardized and comfortable routine of executives and suburbia is a stylized and crude metaphor for the bland existences of millions of people unaware they even have power over their decisions.

The second part is “R.M.F. Is Flying”, in which Plemmons will be Daniel, a policeman who searches for his wife, lost on a scientific expedition (Emma Stone), only to end up rescuing her and finding a different person. His suspicions lead him to subject her to a series of tests, which she willingly submits to, only increasing her husband’s paranoia. The final part of Kinds of Kindness, entitled “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, shows Emily’s (Stone) yearning for belonging and acceptance as a member of a cult (with her husband Andrew), who has been deemed impure and expelled, but desperately seeks redemption.

All three stories are more or less unprecedented, but Filippou is not interested in their complexity but in their value. If it sounds like déjà vu, it is because human cruelty and stupidity go hand in hand, but if we allow ourselves to be absorbed by the immense talents of its performers, we will enjoy Kinds of Kindness, even if we think we have already seen it. The reflection is so ambitious that it can leave us both overwhelmed and indifferent, although admirers of lanthimonic autopsies will explore familiar terrain in which they can choose their own story and its most successful perversion. They will see that the Greek director has not forgotten how to discomfort, but they may struggle to find that unknown land that ennobles and fascinates.

The strong point that retains us, despite the demanding proposal at the level of pace and plot, is the extraordinary performance of its protagonists, demonstrating definitively that Stone has found the perfect match in the tortuous paths of assumed absurdity, of the invisible narrowness and longings that grip what we like to call “modern society”. If in his previous films Lanthimos has forced us to look our life trap in the eye, playing with illogic and worlds governed by rules devised by crazy flying monkeys, more recognizable than they seem, in Kinds of Kindness we may feel closer to a routine exercise in provocation than to a memorable monument to human stupidity. In short, it makes us want to see Poor Things again, where the force of originality, the mystical communion with Emma Stone, the sense of humor, and the intelligent use of dynamite (from the Greek for “force”) against patriarchal society made us want to climb a barricade erected on the ruins of family, sectarian and capitalist tyranny, in other words, of broken chains and contested norms.