In one of the very first scenes of Kinds of Kindness, an uncomfortable-looking guy named Robert – Jesse Plemons, a terrific actor spotted in Friday Night Lights and in Scorsese films – drives his huge car into another sedan. The accident is deliberate and reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Crash; but despite common motifs, Yórgos Lánthimos is precisely not David Cronenberg. Wounded flesh, although it is omnipresent in the film, is a symptom of the disordered world more than the beginning of any re-imagining of desire and its manifold layers. Even when they’re not injured, the characters are examined by the Greek filmmaker, just like a forensic scientist would try and list the causes of death. It’s a style.
The film comes out a few months after the much-awarded Poor Things – four Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Emma Stone, and the Golden Lion at the last Venice Film Festival – and is less appealing than its predecessor, which was characterized by an ample sort of morbid sense of fun. Here, everything is more mechanical. Kinds of Kindness also differs from Lanthimos’ previous film in its anthology-like structure: three stories follow one another, separated by credits. In the first tale, a man lives according to the dictates of a strange mentor, before trying to regain control. In the second story, a couple faces an insurmountable ordeal. In the third, a cult sets out to find someone that might be capable of raising the dead.
The setting changes, and so do the characters; only the actors and actresses remain. In addition to Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Willem Dafoe, among others, return in other parts, in different social and geographical settings. They seem to be having a lot of fun. This is the film’s strongest point, as it partly bases itself on a group feeling, the desire to move from one universe to another like kids playing mimicry with a misshapen reality. What changes, what remains the same? Lánthimos is keen to show just how deep the entire thing can be. In a striking moment within the second part of the film, Daniel (Jesse Plemons) is reunited with his wife Liz (Emma Stone) after she has disappeared, and convinces himself that she no longer is the same person as she was. The size of her feet has apparently changed. A shot of Emma Stone’s feet also raises questions: what if they really did grow? But the viewer is not even offered the time to be confused. Like a well-oiled machine, the film must go o.
What the Greek filmmaker seems intent on saying, during the 2 hours and 45 minutes of his film, is something that resembles the idea that free will doesn’t exist, that our bodies don’t even belong to us. In Poor Things, the heroine lived with someone else’s brain. Here, mutilation, rape and various shifts in physical power dynamics follow one another. We would only wish to see the filmmaker be a little less self-assured in order to be able to dive fully into the oddity of such a proposition.
