Yorgos Lanthimos, director of Oscar-winning ‘Poor Things,’ is back with another hit
Photo via Searchlight Pictures.
Hot on the heels of his widely acclaimed 2023 film Poor Things, which won an impressive four of its 11 Oscar nominations at the Academy Awards earlier this year, director Yorgos Lanthimos is back with a new, even stranger film.
Kinds of Kindness is Lanthimos’ longest film to date, clocking in at two hours and 44 minutes. Despite its runtime, it doesn’t feel overlong, thanks to the film’s brisk pacing. Kinds is divided into three different, mostly independent chapters — “The Death of RMF,” “RMF is Flying,” and “RMF Eats a Sandwich” — so it feels less like a 3-hour film and more like 3 back-to-back episodes of an anthology. The vignettes follow a man trying to regain control of his life, a police officer who finds his missing wife’s return suspicious, and a cultist searching for someone who can resurrect the dead.
The same cast — Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn — returns in each chapter, but to play different characters each time. While the chapters have little to do with each other, the film rewards observant viewers by subtly referencing connections between the separate plots.
The three chapters share more in the way of theme than they do plot. All three are interested in our relationships with authority: why we’re sometimes drawn to it, and how we respond when the sense of security it provides is lost. At the same time, Kinds of Kindness is aware that, while authority can be comforting and reassuring, it can also easily transform into domination and abuse — and the film delivers this cynical worldview with dark humour.
The final chapter, “RMF Eats a Sandwich,” is the strongest, rewarding the audience for sticking through the long runtime. “Sandwich” features the most memorable performances from the entire cast and is the most narratively satisfying vignette, though it doesn’t lose any of its absurdist qualities. Lanthimos’ penchant for strangeness and weird dialogue sells the outlandishness of the cult and alludes to deeper systems of belief and rituals without spoon-feeding answers to the audience.
The other chapters are unfortunately not quite as strong as the last. “Death of RMF” begins the film with a promise of strangeness, but its narrative pace picks up to a sprint by the end of the chapter, so its conclusion comes abruptly. “RMF is Flying” goes to some paranoid, uncomfortable places — giving Plemons and Stone the necessary space to shine — but the rest of the cast have little to do as a result. “Flying” is also the only story in this film where I felt Lanthimos’ insistence on being narratively obtuse was a misstep — unlike “Sandwich,” “Flying” is just slightly too vague to be satisfying.
Kinds convinced me that Plemons is, without a doubt, one of the best actors of this generation. He’s convincingly pathetic and desperate as Robert, Raymond’s (Dafoe’s) favourite doormat, but his knack for playing creepy, unsettling characters makes his performance in “Flying” the best part of an otherwise weak chapter.
After a lesser role in the first chapter, Stone is given much more to work with in the next two. Her performance as Liz in “Flying” walks an elegant line between the seemingly normal partner of Daniel (Plemons) on one hand and the target of his paranoid delusions on the other. However, she delivers the film’s best performance as Emily, a cult member, in the final chapter.
Kinds of Kindness is not the easiest film to recommend. It’s long, bizarre, and often uncomfortable. But I get the sense that’s exactly what Lanthimos wanted it to be.
Fans of Poor Things should be aware going in that this is a very different film — don’t expect visual extravagance — but I’d argue Kinds’ distinct brand of strangeness is a selling point, not an obstacle. This film is well worth your attention.
