Overview
The combination of Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos is one of 21st-century cinema's best, and long may it continue beyond The Favourite, Poor Things and now Kinds of Kindness. The mix of the two-time Oscar-winner, the Greek filmmaker, plus Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley in the last two of those movies has also been working out swimmingly. There's another winning blend in Kinds of Kindness, though, and one deserving of earning the third Lanthimos lead in as many features an Oscar: the writer/director and Jesse Plemons, who has already collected the 2024 Cannes Best Actor award for his trio of roles in this black-comedy triptych. He gives not one, not two, but three exceptional performances. First he plays an employee who loses his boss' faith, then a husband whose wife is lost, then a disciple trying to find a woman with an extraordinary ability.
Sweet dreams are made of this, as the Eurythmics' thumping 1983 hit tells Kinds of Kindness' viewers when it blasts through the movie at full blare from the get-go. There's little that's delectable for the film's characters, or kind for that matter, but Lanthimos back at his darkest, spikiest, and most sinister and cynical — back among the vibes of Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer — is indeed a delicious reverie. As Annie Lennox sings about anthemically, this is a picture about desire. It's equally about everyone looking for something that fulfils those yearnings and stirrings. Using and abusing, wanting to be used and abused, holding and keeping your head up in this cycle of pleasure and pain: so also goes the words of one of the best dance-floor fillers of the past four decades, and now so goes the feature that makes its sentiments a filmic reality as well.
Plemons (Civil War), Stone (Cruella), Qualley (Drive-Away Dolls), Dafoe (Asteroid City), Hong Chau (The Menu), Joe Alwyn (Stars at Noon), Mamoudou Athie (The Burial): they're Lanthimos' troupe in the three tales of his ninth movie. Joining them is Poor Things' Yorgos Stefanakos as RMF, who is driving the car pumping out "who am I to disagree?" and "I travel the world and the seven seas" when the anthology's opening chapter commences. The repertory cast is stunning, on paper and on the screen. So is the filmmaker's knowing playfulness in enlisting them, with some of the most-famous faces who routinely represent humanity — that's acting, after all — toying with being humane's utter absence. Sometimes they're demanding that each other commits murder. Sometimes they're getting cannibalistic. Sometimes they're lopping off their own body parts. Often they're fixated to the point of delusion. La Chimera is already taken as the name of an excellent and unique auteur-helmed 2024 cinema release in Australia, skewing figurative, but the three-headed creature of Greek myth that originated a term for illusions feels like the spirit animal for Kinds of Kindness in more ways than one.
Among actual critters, dogs and cats feature here, more reminders of domesticity taken down startling paths. Neither are crucial to the debut chapter, but that's still the narrative's route, as Plemons' Robert, a salaryman with a spacious home, doting wife (Chau) and slick business job, has the facade of his comfortable existence shattered. His employer and sometimes-lover Raymond (Dafoe) dictates his every move, plotting out instructions on daily handwritten cards. Wardrobe choices, what to eat, who he married, when to have sex: everything is covered. After ten years of willing and eager compliance, Robert then refuses a task, then suspects that optician's assistant Rita (Stone) also has the same control-and-subjugation arrangement. Making Plemons and Stone competitors will pop up again, but next they're husband and wife in the movie's second instalment. He's police officer Daniel, she's marine researcher Liz, and he's distraught about her going missing at sea until she's rescued against everyone else's expectations. Is the woman now sharing his home really his spouse, though? And what lengths will he push her to to test his fears?
In the last of Kinds of Kindness' trilogy of tales, Dafoe's Omi and Chau's Aka steer a cult that's looking for a healer who fits an exacting list of criteria. Doing the searching on their behalf, and being rewarded with sex, plus drinking water purified with their gurus' tears, are Plemons' Andrew and Stone's Emily. In this section as in each before it — and across Lanthimos' entire filmography — how brutal, domineering, selfish and cruel people can be is firmly in focus, as are the beliefs that we cling to to pretend that's not the case. These notions were all a part of The Favourite and Poor Things, of course, as scripted by The Great's Tony McNamara, yet the mood gets stormier when Lanthimos works with his Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer screenwriter Efthimis Filippou. Gone are the whimsy and empowerment that also colours Poor Things, for instance. Still, his work with Filippou remains grounded in heightening everyday traits and patterns, however dystopian or nightmarish they get. Watching this duo's collaborations always means recognising the impulses that spring from the mix of water and flesh that comprise humans, as well as witnessing those relatable urges and compulsions being gleefully and cannily taken to extremes.
Adding to a resume that continues the opposite trajectory to people en masse in Lanthimos and Filippou's view — that'd be getting better and better — Plemons is impossible to peer away from as Robert, Daniel and Andrew alike. Each is an everyman plagued by a need for purpose and belonging, and quickly willing to get vicious to grasp it. But amid the meticulous imagery that always characterises a Lanthimos film, with cinematographer Robbie Ryan (The Old Oak) a master in emphasising new views and angles on what'd be typical sights in other hands, Plemons isn't playing the same character over and over again. As his hair gets shorter chapter by chapter, the Killers of the Flower Moon, Love & Death and The Power of the Dog actor does far more than make his lost, lonely, searching, awkward and angry Kinds of Kindness figures thematic clones or even siblings.
That said, there's a three-sides-of-the-same-coin statement to the picture overall: people are unkind, then people are unkind, then people are unkind once more. The specifics of their personalities and circumstances change. What they're desiring shifts as well. Kinds of unkindness remains the end fresult. As Hunter Schafer (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) rounds out the ensemble, just in one segment, Stone has the same gig as Plemons, and is equally committed. She's in terrain, aka unpacking the savagery that flows through humans like blood, that she's also tapped into in her recent small-screen appearances in The Curse and Fantasmas, 2023's best new TV show and 2024's best in the same field so far. She's on message for Lanthimos, then, even when he's not her director. With him, Stone summed up the Greek Weird Wave great's prevailing perspective on life best when she was earning her second Best Actress Oscar for Poor Things as Bella Baxter: "I have adventured it and found nothing but sugar and violence".
