Yorgos Lanthimos achieving mainstream success in Hollywood probably seemed like a long shot if you were watching his 2009 film Dogtooth. That film, graphically violent and sexually explicit, got a miraculous Oscar nomination for Best International Feature at the time, and it wasn’t the last time Lanthimos would get recognized by the Academy. At this point, he’s best known for his collaborations with Emma Stone, whose volunteered her movie star appeal to boost his uncompromising stories of human cruelty. Stone becoming the Greek filmmaker’s no. 1 muse is a bit of a surprise for both of them, considering the two extremes their careers stood on before coming together, but it’s unlocked something for both artists. Particularly Stone, who changed the entire trajectory of her career. Imagine if 90s Julia Roberts deciding to become 00s Nicole Kidman, and you might begin to understand her shift.

Both The Favourite and Poor Things were big awards season hits for both Stone and Lanthimos, and they were both written by Australian playwright Tony McNamara (Favourite was co-written with Deborah Davis). McNamara has an ear for funny dialogue, but his prestige costume drama sensibility creates a tension with Lanthimos’s baser instincts. They do show Lanthimos’s skill with actors – both films won the Oscar for Best Actress (for Olivia Colman and Stone, respectively). Their latest collaboration, Kinds of Kindness, is not written by McNamara, but by Lanthimos and his frequent co-writer Efthimis Filippou. The duo have writing credits on most of Lanthimos’s other movies, including Dogtooth, and Lanthimos’s best film, The Lobster. The Filippou screenplays put on no airs of respectability, and express a fearlessness in the face of common cinematic decency, unbound by the American morays of sexual modesty.

Kinds of Kindness is in nearly all ways a more successful film than Poor Things, though I highly doubt that it will be considered as such. Kindness‘s complete lack of tact will feel hostile to most any audience, but particularly those who only know Lanthimos for his more Oscar-friendly fare. The script is broken into three stories, all starring Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn. Each story brings us new characters in increasingly eccentric scenarios involving a man named R.M.F. (played in a wordless deadpan by Yorgos Stefanakos), and each story presents us with a parable involving the consequences of human connection. The characters’ names change, as do the details of their situation, but the tone and basic ideas remain the same: our protagonists are helpless to their entanglements with others.

This is a common theme throughout the Lanthimos/Filippou screenplays, where even our supposed heroes climb over others for personal gain, sometimes grotesquely so. Characters struggle to find the difference between romance and sex, and that leads to disaster as lust overbears common reason. Plemons and Stone are the closest thing we get to main characters. In the first segment, Plemons plays Robert, a spineless figure whose entire life is controlled by his boss Raymond (Dafoe); when Robert decides to stand up to Raymond for the first time, his life swiftly falls apart. In the second segment, Plemons is a police officer named Daniel, whose wife, Liz (Stone), is a marine biologist rescued after being lost at sea. Daniel is plagued by the feeling that Liz is not the woman she claims to be, and he takes that uncertainty out on his newly-returned wife. In the last part, Plemons and Stone play two cult members who fight their sensual urges to appease their serene but merciless leaders (Dafoe & Chau).

One could expand on the “plots”, but that feels superfluous. All three stories are filled with alienating behavior, shocking twists of violence, and night black humor, but none of them carry enough narrative heft to supersede the script’s overall goal: to put the viewer in the uneasy position of understanding such malevolent figures. The comedic influence of Filippou – characters deadpanning the most out-of-pocket observations, as if the whole world was suffering from autism and clinical narcissism simultaneously – is like the polar of opposite of McNamara’s aesthete humor, which consists mostly of stately characters in full costume detail saying the word “fuck”. The humor in Kindness both nuzzles deep within the audience’s discomfort, while simultaneously providing you with some relief from said discomfort. On pure laughs, this is probably the funniest movie that Lanthimos has ever made.

Plemons won the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his work here, and well-deserved. The American actor has deftly used his everyman sensibility to weasel himself into some sensational films, giving some incredible performances in both movies and television. Kindness takes advantage of both his boyish vulnerability as well as his chilling intensity. His characters span from pathetic to sadistic, hilarious to morose. The film’s first third ends with Plemons’s Robert committing a truly heinous act, but as a viewer it feels like a moment of triumph, as Robert finds the only way to salvage the life he lost. Stone isn’t front-and-center really until the final third, where her desperation in trying to balance her past and present leads her toward her own despicable act. These people – broken, haunted figures searching for benefits of interpersonal relationships – find their moments of grace in ways you’d never predict.

I understand that many will hate this movie and I wouldn’t waste too much time arguing with them. The anthology structure gives Lanthimos the opportunity to put all of his actors through the proverbial ringer, and while his actors sing his praises, not all audiences will enjoy seeing Plemons emotionally manipulate his partner into self-harm, or to see Emma Stone get sexually assaulted. The frankness of the violence and sexuality feels so obstinate against the heightened nature of the storytelling. But this is where Lanthimos’s brilliance (such as it is) lies, in forcing us to confront our own forbidden desires through the despicability of his characters. It’s a wonderful little game of provocation, that works because his actors buy in on his madness. Poor Things felt like Lanthimos courting the infamy of Lars von Trier. Yorgos will never be that nihilistic. Kinds of Kindness reminds us that when he’s really on, his provocation works on a whole other level.

 

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos