Kinds of Kind­ness review – a sala­cious, sun-bleached fable

Some guy once said some words that res­onat­ed with some oth­er guys, and those words were this: ​“God is dead”. I allude to that quo­ta­tion because the Greek film­mak­er Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos def­i­nite­ly has oth­er ideas. It’s hard to see his work as being spir­i­tu­al, or inter­est­ed in mat­ters of down-to-earth reli­gious dog­ma. He mere­ly believes that God is very much alive, because how else would He be able to tor­ment humankind with every avail­able resource in His con­sid­er­able arsenal?

The iron­i­cal­ly titled Kinds of Kind­ness is a sala­cious, sun-bleached trip­tych in which var­i­ous peo­ple have their lives vio­lent­ly upend­ed by some vari­ety of God-like pres­ence. Each sto­ry com­pris­es its own, fable-like enig­ma that’s not a mil­lion miles away from those seen in clas­sic TV anthol­o­gy ser­i­al, The Twi­light Zone. What are the lim­its of the boss/​employee rela­tion­ship dynam­ic? Is it pos­si­ble to adapt to the behav­iour changes of a loved-one? And how far can some­one push them­selves to dis­play an act of extreme feal­ty to another?

In the first short, titled The Death of R.M.F., Jesse Ple­mons’ char­ac­ter gets to play sub to God’s dom (played by Willem Dafoe, obvs) in a tall tale of death­ly pow­er games and pre­mi­um sports mem­o­ra­bil­ia. A divine hand, a cru­el and manip­u­la­tive one, hov­ers over the sec­ond short, R.M.F Is Fly­ing, in which Emma Stone’s lost-at-sea marine biol­o­gist returns home to dis­cov­er that her dot­ing hus­band (Ple­mons) believes her to be an imposter and insists that she prove her worth.

Final­ly, in R.M.F. Eats a Sand­wich, Stone and Ple­mons play a pair of sexy brain­washed dis­ci­ples, exe­cut­ing the sur­re­al bid­ding of a Sven­gali pow­er-cou­ple (Dafoe and Hong Chau) who are search­ing for the key to bod­i­ly res­ur­rec­tion. The ​“R.M.F.” that fea­tures in the three titles denotes the ini­tials of a man (his full name is nev­er revealed) who is the only char­ac­ter that fea­tures in all three films, sug­gest­ing that, even though all the oth­er actors play dif­fer­ent roles, the events all occur on some kind of lin­ear timeline.

Kinds of Kind­ness sees Lan­thi­mos recon­nect­ing with screen­writer Efthimis Fil­ip­pou, with whom he made The Lob­ster, Alps, Dog­tooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. This new film sees the pair work­ing in a new, more-sophis­ti­cat­ed and cor­us­cat­ing reg­is­ter than ever before, as their abid­ing con­cerns are this time pushed fur­ther and hard­er. The pres­sures that come from sub­mit­ting to a force of sub­lime dom­i­nance inevitably lead to trans­gres­sion, and in this instance, the moments of sple­net­ic vio­lence, when they come, are fun­nier, grim­mer, more shock­ing and even more euphor­ic than they’ve ever been before.

In the past, when Lan­thi­mos and Fil­ip­pou have got­ten togeth­er, their work has tend­ed to take place in what can only be described in a lim­i­nal space of emo­tion­al noth­ing­ness. There’s a Brecht­ian qual­i­ty to Lan­thi­mos’ mis­chie­vous rejec­tion of real­ism. The syn­tax and cadence of spo­ken dia­logue is shorn of all emo­tive capac­i­ty result­ing in a com­ic monot­o­ne in which the let­ters and the sounds and the move­ment of the human mouth are empha­sised to the point of form­ing their own micro per­for­mance. In Kinds of Kind­ness, this mode is vis­i­ble once more, albeit in a man­ner that’s more com­pli­men­ta­ry to the film’s intri­cate plot machi­na­tions and com­plex characters.

Anoth­er return­ing part­ner­ship is with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­bie Ryan, who came on board for The Favourite with a mea­sure of ret­i­cence, but has not looked back since. While he was giv­en free reign to delve into his trea­sure-box of weird vin­tage lens­es for 2023’s stun­ning Poor Things, here we have some­thing visu­al­ly clos­er to the Rob­by Müller-like vis­tas and ​“Amer­i­cana” in quote marks of Wim Wen­ders’ Paris, Texas. While the loca­tions and sets are notice­ably sparse (because why do you need trin­kets when you have a God?), Lan­thi­mos uses the the frame to high­light humor­ous domes­tic objects that draw the eye like still life sub­jects (an umbrel­la stand, a glass, a ketchup bottle).

And he’s gath­ered around him a pri­mo act­ing ensem­ble – every­one involved got the memo and does what is expect­ed of them (which, in most cas­es, is a lot). Stone deliv­ered an all-timer per­for­mance in Poor Things, and she con­tin­ues down the path of becom­ing an actor of rare fear­less­ness and charis­ma with this one. Ple­mons recal­i­brates the dead­pan drawl that has super­charged such mid-tier com­ic works as Game Night and makes a smooth entry into Lan­thi­mos’ demi­monde. Willem Dafoe is Willem Dafoe, one of the most reli­able actors in the game, while Mar­garet Qual­ley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie round things out perfectly.

Indeed, beyond its direct sub­ject mat­ter, the film is also some­thing of an ode to exper­i­men­tal the­atre, as it feels as if we’re watch­ing a well-oiled troupe who are able to slink into dif­fer­ent roles and guis­es at the drop of a hat. As the Lan­thi­mos project extends ever fur­ther, it becomes clear that he’s inter­est­ed in how the con­cept of per­for­mance inter­sects with our every­day lives.

In cas­es where a direc­tor push­es an actor to nudge their per­son­al com­fort zones, and pos­si­bly chal­lenge the per­cep­tion of their pub­lic image, some may read that as the clas­sic ​“direc­tor-as-god” con­ceit. Yet this mode just com­pli­ments the sub­ject mat­ter so well, and there’s a sense that the ideas that the film com­mu­ni­cates would not come across with such droll clar­i­ty were they played in the tra­di­tion­al real­is­tic mode.

Kinds of Kind­ness leaves you with the open ques­tion of its ulti­mate pur­pose, and it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly an easy task to con­nect the three shorts togeth­er in a very sim­ple way. Yet the entries into this wicked com­pendi­um are more inter­est­ing due to their dif­fer­ences rather than their sim­i­lar­i­ties, sug­gest­ing that all types of peo­ple have their lives ruined by some vari­ety of exis­ten­tial conun­drum. And that is some­thing that cre­ates a sprawl­ing lat­tice of deep human connectivity.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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