(3 stars)
Life is cruel, all is vanity, the house always wins and the cosmic joke is on us. Everything in popular culture conspires to hide these truths from us because they’re a lousy way to make money. Occasionally, however, creative artists turn up to remind us of the facts, and they’re usually not American. Kafka. Nabokov. Buñuel. Maybe Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t belong in their company yet, but he’s giving it his best shot.
“Kinds of Kindness” may be the Greek writer-director’s way of clearing the peanut gallery of fair-weather fans after the success d’estime of his last two movies, “The Favourite” (2018) and last year’s “Poor Things.” A nearly three-hour trilogy of absurdist variations on themes of obsession, control and humiliation, the new film is a throwback to Lanthimos’s early work, including “The Lobster” (2015) and the relentlessly bleak “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017) — all three co-written with Efthimis Filippou.
What’s different is the confidence of the filmmaking; the bass note of pitch-black humor; and the support of a devoted stock company that includes Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and — this movie’s secret weapon — Jesse Plemons. Team Lanthimos is growing, and if “Kinds of Kindness” qualifies as maximum audience punishment, those with strong stomachs and a stronger sense of irony may dig it. I know I did.
The movie’s very title seems to be a way of laughing in the dark (to paraphrase Nabokov). The first tale, “The Death of R.M.F.,” stars Plemons as Robert, a man whose “job” is following the daily directives of his boss, Raymond (Dafoe), as to when to eat, what to read (Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”) and when to have sex with his wife (Chau). When he balks after Raymond orders him to kill a man (Yorgos Stefanakos) in a staged car accident, Robert is exiled from his own life and resorts to increasingly desperate measures to regain Raymond’s favor.
Story No. 2 (“R.M.F. is Flying”): A police officer named Daniel (Plemons) becomes convinced that his wife (Stone), recently rescued from a desert island, has been replaced by a look-alike, a delusion that ultimately leads to bodily mutilation and a surprise ending. Story No. 3 (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”): A woman (Stone) in a religious cult run by a sex guru (Dafoe) searches for a prophesied savior who can raise the dead and potentially finds her in an identical twin veterinarian (Qualley).
R.M.F. is the name of the minor character played by Stefanakos, who appears briefly in each vignette, and the connections among the three narratives are elusive and subterranean, like the uneasy rhymes one finds in dreams. Unknown things you should have done but didn’t; the sense that something, somewhere, has come permanently unmoored. The last and arguably the strongest chapter juggles bone-deep sadness, moral horror and a final bark of twisted comedy, and it lets Stone leave her all-American teen persona even farther in the rearview mirror. (The woman’s 35 now and has two Oscars on her shelf; if you don’t like her striking out into unknown territory, “Kinds of Kindness” suggests the problem is yours, not hers.)
Where “The Favourite” and especially “Poor Things” were triumphs of production design, fantastic fishbowl worlds that offered their own dark delights, the new film is stripped to the wall studs by comparison. The locations are mostly anonymous homes and office buildings in and around New Orleans, and the distorted wide-angle camera shots of the earlier movies have been replaced by bland, functional setups. Jerskin Fendrix’s discordant score jangles up and down the piano keyboard like an angry kitten. The entire movie seems designed to scrape your last nerve.
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Why pay money for such a thing? What has this nasty foreign director done to our Emma? Aren’t movies supposed to be fun? “Kinds of Kindness” has already scandalized festival audiences and critics, and the average filmgoer will shrink from it in disgust or ignore it altogether. That’s fine. If you can dial down your metabolism to appreciate a slow-paced art film, though, you can surely steep yourself in the cruel certainties of Lanthimos’s worldview, where human beings are prisoners of their lifelong need for love and acceptance and where we’re all much closer to the animal kingdom than we care to admit. (There’s a between-chapters amuse-bouche of dogs behaving like people that deserves to be its own movie.)
The film is overlong, yet it exerts an intractable pull. Stone may get all the attention — she reprises her headlong dance routine from “Poor Things,” this time as a grim triumph in a parking lot — but with his sandy, anonymous mustache and eyes fixed on the middle distance, Plemons is the movie’s anxious soul.
Watching “Kinds of Kindness,” I thought more than once of the Bertolt Brecht poem that includes the line, “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.” Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.
R. At area theaters. Contains strong, disturbing, violent content; strong sexual content; full nudity; and language. 164 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
