It says a lot about Yorgos Lanthimos as a director that Poor Things, an extravagant black comedy filled with deviant sex and even-more-deviant surgical procedures, qualifies as a step toward the mainstream. To be sure, both Lanthimos and his muse Emma Stone worked a highly effective charm offensive around the movie’s release, and for all its perversity it is at heart an immensely likable and effervescent fantasy. Still, it is worth remembering that Lanthimos remains the director of such cinema of discomfort as Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (and that Stone, for her part, seems to be on a trajectory toward increasingly prickly fare). Lanthimos’ latest collaboration with Stone, Kinds of Kindness, is a return to queasy form, and while it will certainly alienate a large swath of the new fans he picked up with his last film, I found it a strange sort of feel-bad delight.
Kindness is divided into a triptych; it’s being billed as an anthology film, though I prefer to think of it as “sketch tragedy.” In the first segment, Jesse Plemons plays an all-American businessman whose every waking moment is dictated by his boss (Willem Dafoe at his most genteel); next, Plemons is a cop whose wife (Stone) exhibits unusual changes after being rescued from a shipwreck; finally, Stone and Plemons are a pair of cultists scouring the American countryside for a prophesied messiah. There are a handful of common elements which pop up in each segment– an omelet here, a swollen foot there, a character hazily recollecting an unsettling dream– but the stories are by and large discrete; the only concrete throughline is a single, unassuming character, played by Yorgos Stefanakos (a friend of the director whose only other screen credit is Poor Things), who pops up at pivotal moments in each story without uttering a single line.
Actually, let me amend that: the stories are united by a shared, queasy sense of misanthropy toward interpersonal relationships, and human society as a whole. The first segment is probably the most alienating, essentially sending Plemons’ character through a speed run of cosmic punishment and ruination (the precise nature of his relationship with his boss is also deliberately unclear; it certainly seems sexual, but Dafoe treats him less like a boytoy and more like yet another one of his holdings). The second is the most opaque and mysterious, pitting Stone’s (possibly) supernatural (maybe) body-snatcher against Plemons’ clearly unstable cop; even if one is to take everything we see in this segment at face value (which, as a critic, I cannot recommend) there are still elements, such as an off-camera black eye, which are left unexplained and could support either side of the conflict. The third story is probably the most straightforward, relatively speaking– it’s got a clear punchline, in a Tales from the Crypt sort of way– but it contains some of the most hard-to-watch sequences of the film. All three stories are seemingly designed to make you squirm in your seat; comfort viewing, this is not.
Yet, as confrontational as Kinds of Kindness is, I didn’t leave the theater feeling beat up. Much of this comes down to the cast, who perform in each segment like a sort of stock company. The cast Lanthimos has assembled here is a veritable who’s-who of the most exciting actors working today: in addition to Stone, Plemons, and Dafoe, each segment also features Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn (Hunter Schafer also turns up, but only in segment three). Each of these actors possesses an utterly unique screen presence, and almost all of them are currently on my list of people whose presence alone indicates a film worth seeing. Here, we have the pleasure of seeing them all bounce off each other not once, but in multiple configurations.
The standouts, understandably, are Plemons and Stone, who serve as the film’s de facto leads. The pair have come to embrace diametrically opposite acting styles– Stone’s increasingly daring physicality, Plemons’ almost painful internality– but both are adept at walking a tightrope between comedy, tragedy, and horror; when the two of them play opposite each other, you never know which way you’ll fall (oftentimes it’s all three). Likewise, Qualley and Chau offer complementary versions of comic support, Qualley’s fidgety and unpredictable, Chau’s bone-dry (Chau draws some of the film’s biggest laughs from a scene in which she does nothing but silently listen to a Plemons monologue). And you probably don’t need me to tell you that Willem Dafoe is great, but I do find it remarkable that an actor can be so prolific and still almost exclusively appear in movies which are at least worth watching on their own merits; he’s like the anti-Nicolas Cage in this way.
It is also worth emphasizing that Kinds of Kindness is really, really funny. Much of its humor, as one might expect, is in a cerebral, absurdist vein: characters saying or doing things that no human would ever do, or scenes which extend for so long that discomfort loops back to laughter. Again, much of this comes down to the actors and their way with a reading; the phrase “A genuine smashed McEnroe racket from 1984” is almost inexplicably hilarious in Chau’s signature deadpan. But the film also has a winningly silly streak, with countless scenes, lines, and images which made me bark with laughter (for those who have seen the film, I swear that pun is unintentional). The joy of the film, if you can call it that, is that you never know which the film is going to hit you with next: any given scene could just as easily end with a deliberately silly pun or a gruesome death. I fear this may say more about me than about the film, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed as loudly or as frequently in a theater.
Of course, I really can’t stress enough that this film is absolutely not for everybody, and may not even be for most. Each of these stories involves at least one violent death, and the physical and emotional depravity on display is so varied that you’re bound to find something to be viscerally upset by (in particular, there is an assault in the third segment which, while not graphic per se, goes a bit far even by the standards set by the preceding two hours). On the other hand, perhaps the tide has turned when it comes to comfort in comedy. For the past decade and change, “cozy” humor has reigned supreme, first as a victory lap during the Obama years, then as a security blanket during the Trump regime. Now that we’ve all come to terms with the fact that the world is burning, maybe we’re all ready for a little harshness (it sure doesn’t feel coincidental that Kinds of Kindness comes within weeks of the Criterion announcement of Todd Solondz’s Happiness). Kinds of Kindness may be the comedy of our times. God help us all.
Kinds of Kindness
2024
dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
165 min.
Opens Friday, 6/28 – screening on 35mm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre!
