Should you arrive late for Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” you will miss its single most rousing moment: an opening blast of that delectably sour 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The song needs no justification; it could kick off every movie from now until kingdom come. Even so, you may wonder what put Lanthimos, the Greek-born director of such acrid downers as “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017), in a specifically Eurythmics mood. Perhaps, after concocting the mad Victorian brew of “Poor Things” (2023), he wanted to signal a shift back to a more contemporary style of weird. Or perhaps he recognized, in the song’s coolly cynical lyrics, a corrosion of spirit to match his own. “Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused”: there are worse ways to sum up the cruel spectacles of subjugation that Lanthimos has made such a perverse specialty of.
From the start, he has been chillingly consistent. So many of Lanthimos’s movies play like arch behavioral experiments, conducted in a laboratory filled with slow-acting nerve gas. His characters drain all feeling from their faces and speak in flat, disaffected tones, as if they had been treated with emotion-numbing anesthetic. And yet, in that numbness, a kind of subversion persists; the abused do not succumb mindlessly to their abusers. In the Greek chamber drama “Dogtooth” (2009), three children gradually push back against the lifelong house arrest they’ve been subjected to by their parents. “The Favourite” (2018), a rare Lanthimos foray into eighteenth-century English history, presents a royal love triangle in which the balance of political and psychological power is forever in flux. Along the way, Lanthimos has driven home his lessons with often bludgeoning force: the absurdity of sex, the inevitability of violence, the innocence of animals, the beastliness of humans, the rottenness of it all. Another lesson: bad things come in threes.
To wit: “Kinds of Kindness,” which runs nearly three hours and unfurls three dark fables about control, abjection, and the delusion of free will. The stories, written by Lanthimos and his regular collaborator Efthimis Filippou, are self-enclosed narratives, up to a point. The same performers—chiefly Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, but also Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn—appear in all three tales, each time playing different characters. Sometimes the variations are mainly sartorial; Dafoe starts off in a suit and winds up in a Speedo. He’s essentially playing the harsh authoritarian three ways, and in knowingly stark contrast to the more benevolent father figure he gave us in “Poor Things.” That man was called Godwin, or God, for short; this time, Dafoe dances with the devil.
Lanthimos, you may have realized, has more than a passing interest in theology, even if his primary impulse is a desire to ridicule it. The first story he tells is like a corporate-world riff on the Book of Isaiah, with bits of the Parable of the Prodigal Son thrown in for bad measure. Plemons plays an unimaginative drone named Robert, who lives wholly under the thumb of his wealthy boss, Raymond (Dafoe). Their business is unspecified, and of no consequence. Everything Robert has—an attractive home, a shiny gray S.U.V., and a lovely wife, Sarah (Chau)—was given to him, or arranged for him, by Raymond. Every day, Robert receives instructions from Raymond on what to eat, what to wear, and even whether to have sex with Sarah. Every night, again following orders, Robert reads a bit of “Anna Karenina,” perhaps as a reminder of how tragically futile any attempt to liberate himself would be.
Nonetheless, he achieves a liberation of sorts, if only temporarily. Early on, Raymond commands Robert to ram his S.U.V. into a car driven by a man known as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), whom Raymond wants dead. But Robert botches the collision, and, when Raymond orders him to try again (“if you truly love me”), Robert refuses, and Raymond cuts him off completely. Plemons has long been a virtuoso of sad-sackery, and he locates the pathos in Robert’s newfound helplessness. Deprived of directives from his boss, he can’t even order a drink without getting flustered.
Speaking of indecision, it isn’t particularly clear what Lanthimos is skewering here: Corporate tyranny? Religious dogma? General American banality? (The movie was shot in New Orleans, but the setting is an unidentified Anytown of suburban manses, run-down motels, and sleek office buildings.) The problem isn’t that Lanthimos withholds an answer. It’s more that he seems unengaged by the question. He’s fascinated, instead, by patterns of repetition, and by the gamesmanship of words. It can’t be a coincidence that the most significant characters in the first story all have names that begin with the letter “R,” and I haven’t even mentioned Rita (Stone), whom Raymond effectively hires to take Robert’s place. In Lanthimos’s view, we are all interchangeable, which is to say replaceable.
Much of what we see in the first section will recur, at some point, in later ones: a closeup of a woman’s bare heels, an abortion disguised as a miscarriage, and, yes, a grisly vehicular death. The music, composed by Jerskin Fendrix, proves similarly repetitive, an unvaried string of ominously plinking piano notes. Across its three stories, “Kinds of Kindness” occasionally traffics in surface ambiguities, but, from start to finish to start to finish to start to finish, it maintains a persistent through line of self-assured, self-admiring nastiness. By the time we see someone driving a car in circles, it’s Lanthimos who seems to be spinning his wheels.
In the triptych’s second panel, Plemons plays Daniel, who, in keeping with the Biblical tenor, soon finds himself in a den of lying. Daniel is a police officer, and he hasn’t been the same since his wife, Liz (Stone), a marine biologist, went missing. There to comfort him are his partner, Neil (Athie), and Neil’s wife, Martha (Qualley), whose presence supplies the movie’s best, randiest gag. Eventually, Liz is miraculously found alive and returns home, but her newfound taste for chocolate—something she previously abhorred—is one of many clues that lead Daniel to suspect that his real wife has been body-snatched, and he becomes determined to force the truth into the open.
Some Grand Guignol spectacle follows, impish yet weightless, though it does pack some nicely ironic symmetry: if Liz’s palate has changed, it only makes sense that Daniel’s should, too. But the best part of the tale is something else entirely—a hallucinatory sequence, filmed in black-and-white, in which Liz tells her father (Dafoe) about a dream she had, in which the island she was stranded on was ruled by canines. “I must admit, Dad, the dogs treated us pretty well,” she murmurs, and it’s a measure of how reliably Lanthimos’s deadpan-absurdist tone takes hold that you’ll find yourself nodding rather than laughing. Compared with human overlords, the dogs would treat us pretty well.
No surprise, then, that the most sympathetic character in the third story is a veterinarian, Ruth (Qualley), who takes the time to gently bandage a dog’s injury. The wound is inflicted, with icy premeditation, by a woman named Emily (Stone), for reasons too viciously convoluted to get into here. Suffice to say that Emily’s motives stem from her high-ranking position within a bizarre sex cult, led by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), who insist on a stringent doctrine of bodily purity. Everything hinted at in the two prior stories—an anti-religious subtext, an emphasis on dietary restrictions—is rendered thuddingly explicit, as if the movie’s ideas were suddenly metastasizing in the final stretch.
In keeping with the rampant doubling, Ruth has an identical-twin sister, bringing Qualley’s total number of roles to four. Still, this particular yarn belongs to Stone, who tears into the part of the devoted cultist with fearless determination. It would be unfair, though, to compare her work here—unerringly focussed, if joylessly constrained—with her dazzling, Oscar-winning star turn in “Poor Things.” That picture, polarizing as it was, struck me as a breakthrough for all involved. Despite the mock-Frankensteinian disjointedness, Lanthimos gave us a unified vision, bristling with energy and purpose, and fronted by a heroine for the ages. Having made a film in which everything came so beautifully together, did his unrepentant inner trickster yearn to break everything apart again?
Who knows. The one performer to make a proper meal of “Kinds of Kindness” is Plemons. An actor of understated inventiveness, he succeeds, within the confines of the script, in giving us three different characters, each with a distinct emotional coloration. That’s true even when he flattens himself out, in the third yarn, to play a character almost unrecognizable in his dead-eyed impassivity. It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact. And so, as it slogs toward the finish, does “Kinds of Kindness” manage to cough up its last and perhaps most useful lesson: when life gives you Plemons, make Plemons aid. ♦
