For those who only just got acquainted with Yorgos Lanthimos because of his star turn at the Academy Awards this year for Poor Things, it would come as no surprise that viewers hoping for “more of the same” might be disappointed by his quick follow-up, Kinds of Kindness. While, sure, both movies are in keeping with Lanthimos’ penchant for “quirky” (a reductive term if ever there was one in terms of describing anything that is “weird”—also usually a reductive term) narratives starring Emma Stone, Kinds of Kindness is distinctly begat of the auteur’s mind. This being in contrast to Poor Things, which was an adaptation of someone else’s work—specifically, Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. Presented even more overtly as “a Frankenstein story” in Lanthimos’ hands (though, as some pointed out, it was more like the plot of Frankenhooker, released in 1990), audiences were more easily charmed by this kind of “quirk,” paired with Stone’s rendering of Bella Baxter. Put it this way: Poor Things is the most “Tim Burton” Lanthimos has ever allowed himself to get.
In truth, Lanthimos’ “return to himself” with Kinds of Kindness seems in part designed to remind people not to get too used to the linear, “easy-to-pinpoint message” of Poor Things. So it is that the film commences with the first story in the “triptych,” where we’re introduced to the unifying thread of each story: R.M.F. (indeed, that was one of the original titles of the movie, apart from the more abstract And). A man who is never given a clear backstory, yet whose shirt and initials will serve as a consistent talisman. In fact, it is R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) who we first see enter the scene via car while blasting the Eurythmics’ signature 1983 track, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (a song that will also serve as another consistent thread in each story). So begins “Vignette #1,” if you will, titled “The Death of R.M.F.” When R.M.F. knocks on the door of the lavish house he’s arrived at, Vivian (Margaret Qualley) answers the door in a silk robe that’s cut as short as it can be without her ass showing (and, in truth, if Qualley had an ass, it would definitely peek out of a robe like that). She takes one look at the shirt he’s wearing, with his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket and tells her husband, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), over the phone exactly what R.M.F. is wearing, including the assurance that his shirt doesn’t look wrinkled. Even so, she still sends a picture of the shirt to prove it (an initial glimpse into Raymond’s fastidious nature).
R.M.F., we’ll soon find, is the man that Raymond’s emotional whipping boy, Robert (Jesse Plemons), has been tasked with crashing his car into. And why? Simply because Raymond wants him to. Indeed, this particular segment comes across as an allegory for the average employer-employee relationship, with the employer demanding to have total and unbridled control over the person they “own.” For the past ten years, Robert has been only too willing to do whatever Raymond has asked of him—from marrying Sarah (Hong Chau), the woman Raymond “picked out” at the Cheval Bar (where they’re regulars) to lacing her coffee with mifepristone because Raymond doesn’t want Robert to have children (that could be very distracting from work, after all). Thus, the toxicity masquerading as “love” (mainly for all the material things that Raymond provides him with in exchange for Robert’s total lack of autonomy) shines through at its most unignorable when Raymond makes this request. The request for Robert to crash into R.M.F. Of course, Robert has no idea who R.M.F. is, he’s merely told that the man is willing to die (if the crash should happen to be too impactful) for this bizarre exercise in fealty.
One might say that the entire running motif of Kinds of Kindness is, in fact, fealty. And the lengths that people are willing to go in order to prove it to a toxic “alpha” in the situation. This much is also true in the next “vignette,” “R.M.F. Is Flying” (perhaps an allusion to his limbo state after finally being run over multiple times by Robert in response to Raymond cutting him off cold turkey from his “love”). In this setup, Plemons is now Daniel, a police officer reeling over the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Stone), who is some kind of marine biologist lost at sea. Her miraculous return with her fellow researcher, Jonathan (Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson), is met with joy and relief by their friends, Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Martha (Qualley), and Liz’s father, George (Dafoe). However, it is less comforting to Daniel when he starts to suspect that the woman who has returned is not his wife at all. Mainly because it’s “little details” about her that aren’t tracking with the “original” Liz. For a start, this Liz is perfectly okay to eat chocolate, a sweet she hated before, and, secondly, because her feet are suddenly slightly too big for all her shoes. When Daniel tells his theory to Sharon (Chau), Jonathan’s wife, she can only stare back at him in disbelief.
Despite no one believing him, Daniel’s conviction that his wife isn’t really his wife only intensifies, causing him to have an “episode” on the job that leads to his suspension from the force. Still convinced that Liz is someone else, he proceeds to test how devoted she is to him, demanding that she cook her own thumb for him to prove her love (side note: he’s been on a hunger strike against anything she makes for him). When she actually does, he not only says her thumb is disgusting and he would never eat it, but he also then ups the ante by requesting that she cook her own liver for him (talk about a Hannibal Lecter-esque sweet fantasy, or “sweet dream,” to be more Eurythmics-centric). At the end of this petite histoire, the real Liz does show up once Fake Liz ends up killing herself with a self-extraction of the liver to prove her love. What’s the additional message here? Perhaps that “real” love isn’t always that selfless. Otherwise it can get pretty tainted pretty fast.
And, speaking of “tainted,” that’s what the final “vignette,” “R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich,” is all about. Namely with regard to (sex) cult leaders Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) insisting on their subjects’ “purity” if they are to be accepted into the, er, fold for fucking. Whenever Omi or Aka hears that one of their “subjects” has broken the bonds of “loyalty” to the cult (which is somewhat ironic considering they’re all fucking multiple people…but hey, so long as it’s within the cult, it’s fine), they have their ways of testing for compromised “purity” (a.k.a. STDs).
Emily (Stone), a recent convert to the “cause,” seems overly eager to prove herself and her, again, fealty, to Omi and Aka by seeking out a healer that can supposedly reanimate the dead. Which is why the story begins with measuring and weighing the latest “potential” healer, Anna (Hunter Schafer), like she’s a piece of meat. Joining Emily in that task is Andrew (Plemons), a fellow cult member that’s been “assigned” to Emily, as it were, by Omi and Aka. When they try to get Anna to deliver on the final (and most important) test—reviving the dead—she fails…much to Emily’s (in particular) dismay.
After the disappointment, Andrew and Emily get into her vibrant purple Dodge Challenger and continue on their way, talking to Aka over the phone about whether or not they have enough water for the journey. This rather precise question sets up one of the cruxes of the storyline, which is that, in order to be “pure,” the cult members must only drink water that has been “crafted” out of Omi and Aka’s tears. Ergo, they’re given thermoses filled with this “special” kind of water (a kind of kindness, duh) whenever they hit the road on one of their quests to find the healer. Of course, they’re not flying totally blind. There are certain known criteria about the healer they’re looking for: she’s a woman, she’s a twin, she’s a twin whose other twin died and she has a specific age, height and weight.
As for Emily’s “former” life before becoming a cultist, she was a mother and a wife to Joseph, portrayed by Joe Alwyn, who takes the chance on playing a role where he “has to” rape in a climate that already has him in “villain mode” thanks to his breakup with Taylor Swift (who, yes, will probably uncomfortably watch this movie and scene since Emma Stone is in her “squad,” as is Jack Antonoff’s wife, Margaret Qualley). Occasionally pulled back to that “old life” of hers out of a sense of, let’s say, wifely and maternal duty, Joseph ends up getting her cast out of the cult when he date rapes her, and Omi, Aka and Andrew immediately find out when they catch her coming out of the house the following morning.
In the wake of her “affront” to their “cause” (like all cult leaders, that cause is ultimately self-aggrandizement), they drag her to their outdoor “steam room.” A “hot box” is more like it—and one that looks like something out of Midsommar. Cranking the heat up as high as possible to “purify” her, when she is taken out of the box and placed on a perch for Aka to lick sweat off her stomach and see if she’s still “contaminated,” the result is not in Emily’s favor. Shunned from the cult, Emily determines to prove her commitment by finding the healer, once and for all. A quest that, predictably, results in catastrophic circumstances.
As Kind of Kindness concludes with a mid-credits scene where we finally do see R.M.F. eating that sandwich, the viewer is left to reconcile the idea that maybe blind loyalty is more pathetic than it is noble (see: Republicans and Trump). Something that shouldn’t have to be spelled out for people at this juncture, but, sadly, still needs to be. As a matter of fact, many will likely not get that message because Kinds of Kindness doesn’t spell it out enough for the average feeble mind. And, maybe, in his own meta way, Lanthimos is actually testing the loyalty of his “true” devotees with this film.
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