It’s strange how we, as viewers, can attracted to grotesquery in cinema. My immediate theory is that those of my age cohort grew up in the era of schmaltzy hyper-real dramas that romanticized the human condition. Younger readers, it’s true, there was a time when the kind of moralizing, bible-baiting “everything works out in the end for righteous people” product you’d see on the Hallmark Channel and Pureflix was a more routine presence in your local cinemaplex. With shifting cultural mores, films as sermonizing (either through a theological or nationalistic prism) has continued to be minimalized and largely relegated to streaming with only a few notable examples. But little of note has replaced it either in the popular discourse. It’s a bit of a callback to that old critical saw: “what happened to the mid-budget drama?” and while there’s a greater debate to be had there there’s no denying that so much of what is produced now is filed down to appeal to everyone and thus appeals to no one in particular. Nothing can be ugly, nothing can be sexualized, nothing can have any edge. At least outside of the margins or anything starring Zendaya.
This is why Yorgos Lanthimos‘ work prior to 2019 was such a breath of fresh air. With films like Dogtooth and Alps he was a broad taboo breaker and then in his English language bows The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, he formalized that deliciously perverse style into something that was more likely to attract American audience goers. As the years go on, my appreciation of those two films has grown exponentially, an example of a filmmaker who is just willing to consistently *go there* your own sensibilities be damned. And thankfully he does it without approaching the shock horizon that causes audience members to get up and leave the works of someone like Gaspar Noe.
It might come as some surprise then, if this critic revealed his disdain for Lanthimos’ attempts to breakthrough the awards mainstream over the last few years. For reasons all his own, the Greek filmmaker paused his ongoing and increasingly successful collaborations with co-writer Efthimis Filippou to instead work with Tony McNamara. That collaboration gave way to a pair of feature that began promisingly and then devolved into grating self parody by the time Poor Things (one of my picks for worst Best Picture nominee of the last 10 years) was released.
Kinds of Kindness, which reunites Lanthimos with a couple of his Poor Things stars (Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley) seems to have been shot in whatever days off the previous film’s production schedule had. As always, I’m a bit of a sucker for the “one for me” give and take that filmmakers engage in with studios or themselves, and while the former doesn’t apply here – there’s a sense that perhaps the latter is taking shape. Or the universe is healing. Or whatever cliche you want to use because: Mean Yorgos is finally back and he’s reteaming with Filippou.
Unless you’re a cinematic masochist like me, Kinds of Kindness may be a tough sell. It’s an unrelentingly bleak anthology piece that recycles the same core players (the three above plus the always outstanding Jesse Plemons, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Joe Alwyn) in narratives that both interlock narratively – in brief fashion with one character carrying over into each story (played by Yorgos Stefanakos, a friend of the director and co-screenwriter) and thematically as each story centers on a figure attempting to parlay their own twisted sort of kindness to reach the better nature of someone that is currently unobtainable. In stories that center on, respectively: an employee being ordered to kill another man by his employer, a police office reunited with his long lost wife but realizes something isn’t right, and a cult member trying to find their new messiah, you can imagine the maladies and misfortunes that unfold.
While the entire triptych works beautifully as a unified whole and gives way to one of the year’s best films thus far, I wanted to center in on the middle piece entitled “RMF Goes Flying”. Last year, I watched the Nicolas Cage starring film Dream Scenario. A largely very good picture that runs out of steam before it concludes, but my biggest takeaway as a writer of fiction was a sense of jealousy that I hadn’t thought of that idea first. It was just too damn good. I stewed on that for a few days while also wallowing in a very specific sort of buzz that it existed in the first place. That second story in Kinds of Kindness produced the exact same feeling for me once again. A brilliant idea that would made for a perfect novella was instead turned into a sharply constructed piece of paranoid celluloid. Seeing Plemons’ cop completely devolve into something inhuman in order to underscore his own beliefs became this perfect snapshot of the current moment while also executing a kind of speculative piece that is right up my alley. And unlike the Cage feature, it ends on a perfect note. Maybe that’s the benefit of a shorter length of runway, but whatever the reason, I’m willing to argue this segment alone is quite likely the finest thing Lanthimos has made.
Now that I’ve said that, you gotta see it.