In a Yorgos Lanthimos film, control is everything, as is transgression. The desire to break free and assume a radical, untethered selfhood was on rich display in his previous film, Poor Things. In it, led by Emma Stone channelling glorious abandon, we were taken on a globe-hopping, rollicking journey towards a woman’s liberation. While that film was a vibrant steam punk explosion, Lanthimos’ latest Kinds of Kindness is a more visually muted outing. What spills over are monochromatic brief intermezzo-like sequences. The director trades the bombastic, sprawling sets of Poor Things for a drab, generic American urbanity in this film while retaining all his familiar preoccupations.
Co-written with Efthimius Filippou, Lanthimos splits Kinds of Kindness into three seemingly independent stories, delving into interpersonal ties of obligation and obeisance. A primary coterie of actors-Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, among others-flip through the three tracks, gamely shifting to many shades of kink.
In the opening and most well-realised chapter, Robert (Jesse Plemons) confronts a moral crossroads when his boss and lover, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), makes a difficult order. Raymond has stage-managed every aspect of his employee’s life, even choosing his wife, Sarah (Hong Chau), and picking their house. Robert resists for the first time. Raymond lashes out, turning to a new play thing in Rita (Emma Stone). Wounded, Robert cannot accept his sudden abandonment. His whole life falls apart without his boss’ control. Propping up several times in the film, the Bee Gees song How deep is your love? spells out the degree to which one person can go to wrest back the attention of the other.
In a similar vein to Robert jostling to regain the lost affection of his boss, the second story circles an oceanographer, Liz (Stone), who has to prove to her husband the depth of her love. This devotion goes to extremes. The husband, Daniel (Plemons), doubts whether it is indeed Liz, who has returned after her research trip went awry. There had been no word of her whereabouts. The new Liz is starkly different. Her shoes don’t fit her anymore. She devours chocolate which she used to hate and cannot remember his favourite song. Her sexual hunger also startles him. Is it really his wife or an alien in disguise? His paranoia gets steeper and steeper.
A staple in the Lanthimos-verse, the perverse, cruel and warped demands characters make on each other play out as a matter of fact. Bizarre visions and dreams creep up, including black-and-white demented flashbacks to the island where Liz got stranded, turned feral and might have been switched. Lanthimos establishes peculiarity as a possible route to discovery, teasing a slippery ground to Daniel’s stubborn distrust of his wife. Could it all just a matter of him denying his wife from being anything except his idealised imagination of her?
Jerskin Fendrix’s jangling off-key piano notes make the already uncomfortable scenes more sore-edged. This is, as always, carved with poker-faced humour. To remember Liz, Daniel watches with his friend and his wife the sex tape of the foursomes they indulged in. There is a swift cut to a dog’s long, judgemental stare.
In Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos unpicks devotion’s many faces, including how it acts as smokescreen for projecting security. Characters are capable of this self-awareness. Take the scene in the second section, where Liz admits to her father her husband may not be ideal but she’d rather take it instead of having no one by her side. Through all the sections, Lanthimos gestures to this acidic reflection. One can walk deeper and deeper into a relationship, despite recognising its toxicity.
In the third story, Lanthimos twists the toxicity further. What if the refuge we take in escaping an abusive relationship becomes its own beast? Emily (Stone) drops out of domesticity, done with the gaslighting of her husband, even if it entails leaving her daughter behind. When we first meet her, she’s already in the grips of a cult, headed by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau). The singular tenet of the cult is a strict compliance with sexual fidelity just to this couple. Any breaches are detected by Aka once she licks the sweat ‘toxins’ of members after they are holed up in a super-heated sauna.
However, this section is the most overt and underdeveloped. As opposed to the earlier tracks, equations traced and hinted here are patchy. Stone is made to do the heavy-lifting. But how much can an actor’s charisma tide over the narrative, which is faintly illuminating only when put in an intertextual dialogue with the other two stories?
These stories peek into each other rather than neatly intersect. The mute R.M.F character (Yorgos Stefanakos), only known by his initials and who formally links the chapters, flits like a phantom. Lanthimos pre-empts the viewer temptations of scrambling to find hidden convergences. Echoes come through unexpected visual reiterations, the way a scene is framed, the habits of characters. So we are struck by the uncanny similarity in the act of prying, between Robert in the first story and Emily in the third, down to the very scene’s setup. Throupling, platonic and sexual, recurs in the stories.
Even Emily’s desperate latching onto the cult, as if it were a community of care and healing from all her marital unhappiness, has resonances of how Robert ultimately views his relationship with Raymond. Other features also dovetail, besides the usual Lanthimos misanthropic, absurdist bent.
How do we gradually internalise manipulation and domination? It’s a need for direction, no matter if it’s damaging, evident in both Robert and Emily. In a wretched craving for an anchor, people get trapped in the most vicious cycle of handing themselves over to the other, if there’s a glimpse of validation. Kinds of Kindness does waver at times, making you feel Lanthimos is merely rolling out an assembly line of fetishes with the puppy energy of someone who’s just stumbled across them. Nevertheless, the tonal swerves the director aces, leaping from grimace-inducing grossness to pure emotion in the same breath, makes this film constantly riveting.
