Wild ‘Kinds of Kindness’ Lets Emma Stone’s Freak Flag Fly

Poor Things was anything but a typical year-end award winner, but it was of a general piece with director Yorgos Lanthimos’ recent star-studded films, from 2015’s The Lobster and 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer to 2018’s Oscar-winning The Favourite. All of these off-kilter works marked their maker as one of modern cinema’s most floridly idiosyncratic, although in terms of sheer eccentricity they still paled in comparison to the features that earned him initial international recognition, beginning with 2009’s Dogtooth. Those breakthrough efforts were resolutely strange and opaque, challenging audiences to not only follow their winding courses and haphazard detours but to tolerate their peculiar rhythms, uncanny humor, and unexpected grossness.

And with Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos now brings his old-school degree of bizarreness to the mainstream.

A triptych whose title provides merely a vague clue as to its overriding purpose, Lanthimos’ latest, which hits theaters June 21, is a study of compassion, love, sacrifice, and belonging that doesn’t embrace oddness so much as sloppily tongue-kiss it. Attuning itself to its own wacko wavelength and then riding it through three distinct tales—which are populated by the same actors in different roles—it’s about as unconventional as marquee releases get, frustrating easy readings and thwarting dramatic and comedic expectations at every careening turn. Alternately electric and maddening, it’s likely to polarize audiences more than any multiplex offering this year.

Kinds of Kindness doesn’t waste time forcing viewers to play catch up. In its opening chapter “The Death of R.M.F.,” Robert (Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor for his performance at the Cannes Film Festival) deliberately crashes his car into a midnight-blue BMW. While he’s not badly injured, Robert desperately tries to get himself admitted to the hospital. Through various indirect clues, the reason for this crazy behavior slowly becomes clear: Robert’s every life choice is dictated to him by his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe), and this is another of the corporate bigwig’s instructions. Since Robert failed to accomplish his task of killing the other driver, Raymond orders him to do it again. When he balks, he’s cast out by Raymond, thereby also detonating Robert’s marriage to his (Raymond-selected) wife Sarah (Hong Chau).

This sounds nuts and it plays even nuttier in Kinds of Kindness, whose script (by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou) drops numerous outlandish details about its protagonists and their circumstances. If this first installment trades in issues of domination, deception, and obedience as a means of achieving happiness, its subsequent segment “R.M.F. is Flying” has to do with identity, role-reversals, and consumption.

Police officer Daniel (Plemons) is not himself anymore thanks to the at-sea disappearance of his researcher wife Liz (Emma Stone). He’s comforted by his married friends Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Martha (Margaret Qualley), who acquiesce to his request that they commiserate by watching a video of the two couples having an X-rated foursome. When Liz is discovered, Daniel is relieved—until, that is, he decides (because she now likes cigarettes and her shoes don’t fit) that she’s not his wife. There are hints that Liz may have survived by resorting to cannibalism, and it’s not long before Daniel is having similar urges.

This lunacy is embellished by black-and-white flashbacks and dream sequences (not to mention monologues about unseen slumbering fantasies), and it’s shot by Lanthimos with wide-angle lenses, lengthy zooms into close-up, and camera movements that sometimes appear to psychically anticipate his subjects’ movements before they make them. Kinds of Kindness is formally askew and that’s exacerbated by Jerskin Fendrix’s score—in which choral singing signifies momentous developments, and high and low piano keys are repeatedly pounded in order to amplify tension—as well as staging that separates figures amidst empty space. To top it all off, Lanthimos and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis stitch their material together with sharp cuts and transitional fades that produce a singularly unusual tempo.

Those hoping for a reprieve from this irregularity receive nothing of the sort in the concluding “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” which takes longer than its predecessors to reveal the nature of its basic plot.

Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Jesse) are on the hunt for a mysterious woman coveted by their benefactors Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), who reside in a remote beachside mansion. There, Omi and Aka have sex with their followers, once those lucky individuals prove that they’re cleansed of impurities by sweating themselves silly in a sauna and getting licked by Aka, and the duo cry into a hot tub whose water is collected by disciples like Emily and Andrew. Emily is a die-hard member of this cult, her zealous enthusiasm echoed by the batshit vigorousness with which she drives her Dodge Challenger around town. Nonetheless, her lingering emotional ties to her abandoned husband (Joe Alwyn) and daughter (Merah Benoit) beget unforeseen trouble.

Kinds of Kindness doesn’t simply refuse to tip its hand regarding its overriding concerns—it aggressively obscures them. There are moments throughout this trifurcated saga when that tack comes off as more vexing than entrancing, and its drollness doesn’t always land. Still, Lanthimos’ freakiness is genuine and consistently surprising, such as the random use of Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” as an amusing sonic punctuation. Kinky sex and shocking violence are regular components of the proceedings, and the filmmaker orchestrates his action in such a way that nothing quite blends and yet everything holds together just enough to avoid completely falling apart. Think of it as a square peg being rammed hard enough into a round hole to stay put.

Even though its stories don’t resemble Lanthimos’ prior efforts, Kinds of Kindness is a natural entry in the auteur’s oeuvre, and it’s aided by performances that locate the right measure of startling abnormality. Of those, the standouts are from Plemons and Stone, the former moving freely between milquetoast and menacing, and the latter so darkly mysterious in all three parts that—following her Academy Award-feted turn in Poor Things and her tour de force in Showtime’s The Curse—she reconfirms her standing as Hollywood’s most fearless actress. She’s as daringly, uncompromisingly out-there as her director, and all the more magnificent for it.