‘Kinds Of Kindness’ review: darkly comic drama with a cruel streak

After his (relatively) accessible sex comedy Poor Things, Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos is back at peak freaky. The director’s third straight collaboration with Emma Stone, who won an Oscar for her performance in Poor Things as a grown woman with the brain of a foetus, is being billed as a “triptych fable”. That’s a suitably ambiguous description for a restlessly provocative 165-minute epic that is essentially three films in one. One contains casual cannibalism that will make you wince; another follows a sex cult whose members fetishise the amount of water in the human body. So yes, the dial is definitely set to “peak freaky”.

All three stories feature the same crack company of actors – Stone and her Poor Things co-stars Willem Dafoe and Marquaret Qualley, plus Lanthimos novices Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie – but they play different characters each time. The only common denominator is the peripheral presence of R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), a mysterious non-verbal character who invites us to find parallels in the triptych. These comparisons are likely to be highly subjective, however, because Lanthimos offers no easy answers or clear moral takeaways. Kinds Of Kindness might leave you feeling exasperated – or it might keep you dissecting its themes for weeks to come.

The first story centres on subservient worker Robert (Plemons), whose every move is dictated by his sleekly domineering boss Raymond (Dafoe). When Robert briefly defies his superior, everything he holds dear begins to disappear, including his wife Sarah (Chau) and, even more surreally, a smashed tennis racket that belonged to John McEnroe. The second story is also driven by Plemons, who plays an initially unremarkable cop called Daniel whose wife Liz (Stone) is missing at sea. When she returns in miraculously rude health, Daniel is convinced she’s been replaced by a double and refuses to eat. To test her mettle, Robert asks ‘Liz’ to roast her finger with fresh cauliflower, so she obligingly grabs a sharp knife.

The third story puts Stone at the forefront and is perhaps the most narratively satisfying. She plays Emily, a woman who has abandoned her husband and daughter to join a cult whose membership depends on maintaining the leaders’ skewed view of sexual purity. Emily and comrade Andrew (Plemons) have been tasked with tracking down a young woman with the power to raise the dead, but Emily’s single-mindedness is thwarted when she reconnects with husband Joseph (Joe Alwyn). In the first two stories, Alwyn is curiously underused, but here he shines as a man whose blandly handsome facade hides a murky moral compass.

Kinds Of Kindness isn’t an easy watch – the title has got to be ironic, because any shards of kindness are overridden by degradation, dark humour and profound human selfishness. But there’s something undeniably impressive about the whole enterprise, in which Lanthimos has found the perfect co-conspirators: Plemons’ ambiguous quality suits his opaque stories, while Stone’s charisma warms the edges of his chilly filmmaking. The result is a singular, freaky challenge that’s definitely worth accepting.

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