Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn, Hunter Schafer
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Country: Greece
UK Release: Disney+
I couldn’t be more of a Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things) fan. The absurdist, deeply comic but unsettlingly dark director has produced some of the most original movies of the last decade. But for every auteur there are the masterpieces, plus the films they use to hone their craft. While The Lobster and Dogtooth were definitely the former, Kinds Of Kindness is undoubtedly one of the latter.
Essentially this is a short-film anthology, masquerading as a feature film. Its cast plays different roles in all three of its segments, which are linked only by a peripheral character known enigmatically as R.M.F. In the first film, Jess Plemons (The Irishman, The Power Of The Dog) plays a subservient man who follows the erratic orders of his boss and lover, played by Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse, Antichrist), including to kill R.M.F. When he fails to do so, he is quickly replaced by another colleague to finish the job, played by Emma Stone (La La Land, The Help).
The second film sees a man (Plemons) whose wife (Stone) is lost at sea. However, when he is returned to him alive, he suspects that the woman in his house is actually an imposter. And in the third film, two members of a sex cult (Plemons & Stone) attempt to find a woman who can raise the dead (Schafer – Cuckoo, The Hunger Games franchise). Members of the cult can only sleep with its leaders (Dafoe & Chau – The Whale, The Menu), who hold inordinate power over them.
Each of these films carry the hallmarks of Lanthimos’ wild imagination, with dead-pan characters reacting to ridiculous situations with absolute sincerity. Sex and its silliness sits at its heart, with characters bed-hopping back and forth with each other, regardless of their gender. Long-time collaborator Stone is on top form here, delivering three excellent performances, but it’s Plemons who really steals the show, playing three bitter everymen with bountiful acidity that won him the Best Actor prize at Cannes.
With ample support from Dafoe, Chau, Qualley (Drive-Away Dolls, The Substance), Athie (Patti Cake$, The Front Runner), Alwyn (The Favourite, Harriet) and Schafer, this is an exquisite ensemble cast who enact the Lanthimos absurdism with enthusiastic aplomb. However, it’s the film’s peculiar structure – and almost three hour runtime – that make this a difficult and slow watch. Just like when Wes Anderson made The French Dispatch, this is an auteur wandering into self-indulgence and movie studios capitalising on his current fandom. The reality is that if any of the three ideas were strong enough to be expanded to become a feature film, they would have been, meaning that we’re left with a trio of under-developed stories cherry-picked from the reject pile.
This is a film solely for Lanthimos fans and won’t find favour with anyone beyond this, which explains its lack of a cinema release. But even for his fans – including myself – this is like listening to a B-sides collection of your favourite singer, not a studio album.
UK Release: Out now on VOD on Disney+
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