I for one enjoyed Poor Things (reviewed on this blog by my esteemed colleague Arturo Serrano). It was deeply odd, yes, and I can certainly understand critiques of its gender politics (as a man I feel like it really isn’t my place to jut in on that subject either way, although it did seem to me that the film was portraying some of the happenings as morally dubious), but it was fascinating in its way. The film before that by director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, I likewise enjoyed. His most recent project, the subject of this review, is his new film Kinds of Kindness, released on June 2024 in the United States, written by Lanthrimos and Efthimis Filippou, and distributed by Searchlight Pictures.
Kinds of Kindness is a very odd film even in its format. It is not one single narrative, so common as to be assumed by the culture at large as being what a film naturally is, but rather an anthology film of three different segments that share actors but nothing else - no characters, no plot elements, nothing, beyond thematic connections. You could even argue that there is no single genre between them; the first segment has no noticeable supernatural element, the second quite clearly does (although the nature of it is left unstated, and you could stretch it to be solely mundane, but I don’t think that works as well), and the third is such a tossup I’m not entirely sure how to categorize it. I will say something unequivocal right now: this film is fucking weird.
I commented about this film on a forum that I frequent and the response I got called The Favourite and Poor Things as his relatively mainstream films, and that this film marked his return to his deeply odd indie film origins. That comment made me reflect upon just how flexible, how broad, that term ‘mainstream’ is. Those two films had coherent, comprehensible plots that posited a chain of events with comprehensible, if strange, reasons for the courses they take. The three segments in this film, on the other hand, only do so much of that. The end result is a deeply odd, disorienting experience. It brought to mind a friend’s description of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: “imagine if you described the idea of a movie to aliens, and what life on Earth is like to said aliens, and then giving them the equipment to make a movie, but never actually letting them actually see for themselves what movies are like, or what life on Earth is like.” Wiseau blundered his way into the narrative uncanny valley, whereas Lanthimos has done it very deliberately; both films, via different paths to it, feel like they are bizarre approximations of movies, ersatz movies even, and you wonder if you are even ‘watching’ them so to speak.
The first segment is about a boss and employee at a corporation that has become something of an unhealthy sadomasochistic relationship; the boss has designed his employee’s life for him, choosing a house and a spouse for him, all the way to dictating his daily schedule. The second involves a couple: a marine biologist who goes missing on an expedition, upon whose return her police officer husband becomes convinced she is not really her. The third involves a cult that wants to raise the dead, and is willing to go through a rather bizarre process to find someone who can do it.
As stated previously, these stories are not directly related to one another. They do share certain thematic elements; all take fairly normal classes of relationships and twist them in discomforting ways, so that they are still recognizably what they are, and yet distorted to extreme degrees. They are all about intrusions into the normal by things that are deeply unhealthy, indeed dangerous, for their health and their wellbeing. In two out of three cases, that unhealthy thing has already subsumed their lives; in the remaining one, it jolts into existence with a bang.
There’s a certain emphasis on the unpleasant parts of the human psyche, be it cruelty or lust or the urge to find belonging even in the most unpleasant, dysfunctional places. There is a fair amount of sexual content, nudity a few times, group sex once, and sexual assault once, as well as some occasions of dubious power dynamics (one of these lets you see a naked Willem Dafoe, which is something I never thought I’d see). This is a focus that reminds me of the oeuvre of the Coen Brothers, in their focus on how nobody can ever live up to the loftiest ideals, that we are still creatures of blood and sweat and tears and hormones (lots of hormones). There are all sorts of personalities here, basically all of them dysfunctional in some way. As the Eurythmics put it:
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
This film is a filmmaker’s film, and perhaps most of all an actor’s film. Willem Dafoe is deeply unsettling as an abusive boss and as a sex cult leader (that’s why you see him naked). Jesse Plemons perhaps gets to steal the whole show, with prominent roles in all three segments, sometimes meekly submissive and unsure what to do, and at other times losing his mind as he tries to establish control over his circumstances. And, for fans of Poor Things, Emma Stone returns with a raft of more weird, unsettling performances. I have seen comments on Bluesky saying that Stone represents progress in women’s roles in cinema by virtue of letting women play creepy little weirdos; Hollywood should let her do more of that because she’s very good at it.
I’m honestly not entirely sure if the concepts exist in any earthly language to properly describe Kinds of Kindness. It is a film that feels deliberately alienating, as if it employs Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, although leaving what social structure it wants to draw attention completely unindicated. I’m not sure there is a genre that this film fits into, or what audience he was going for. I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed this film, but I certainly don’t regret it. It is, however, a hard sell to basically everyone on planet Earth.
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The Math
Nerd Coefficient: i/0
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
