Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Cruel to Be Kind: Film Review of Kinds of Kindness
★★★★☆
Yorgos Lanthimos creates films that balance on a razor’s edge between pain and pleasure. They are generally funny—sometimes wincingly so—but can be extremely difficult to watch. They can be as labyrinthine as the Villa Pisani, as puzzling as a thought experiment, or as strangely logical as a dream. One recurring theme in films such as The Lobster, The Killing of Sacred Deer, The Favorite, and Poor Things is the shifting nature of power, particularly in the nature of sexual relationships. His work also almost always incorporates elements of Greek culture, particularly mythology, into his work.
Kinds of Kindness is the latest in the Lanthimos oeuvre. Unlike his previous films, it is a tryptic, a collection of three separate yet strangely connected narratives. The first, “The Death of RMF” is a tale about a young man Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons), who works for Raymond (Willem Defoe), his controlling boss and lover. Raymond writes out a daily schedule for Robert including exactly what he eats, where he goes, whether or not he can have children, what kind of whiskey he drinks, and when he makes love to his beautiful wife Sarah (Hong Chau). Raymond has bought their house and car and gives them extravagant gifts, including collectors’ items like one of John McEnroe’s broken tennis rackets.
Near the beginning of the film, Robert is ordered to crash his car into a man with the initials RMF and kill him. Robert does so, but both men survive. Raymond orders him to try again. Robert refuses and Raymond gets angry and fires Robert, whose life begins to disintegrate. He goes to visit Raymond and his lover Vivian (Margaret Qualley) at their home and is again rebuffed. When he tells Sarah that Raymond prevented them from conceiving a child by giving her abortion pills, she leaves him. Soon after, he discovers someone has taken the McEnroe racket.
Despondent, he meets Rita (Emma Stone) a young woman and discovers that she is Raymond’s new protégé. After discovering she was in a car crash and is in the hospital, he goes to visit her and happens to see RMF, the man he was supposed to crash into. Desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces, he kidnaps RMF from the hospital, dumps him in the parking lot and runs him over. He runs over to Raymond’s house and is welcomed by him and Vivian with open arms. The last eerie shot is a close-up of Vivian, Robert, and Raymond’s head on the couch.
The second installment “RMF is Flying” is about Daniel (Plemons) a young policeman who is worried about his wife Liz (Stone) who has disappeared at sea. When she is unexpectedly rescued, he is at first overjoyed but then, when she starts exhibiting unusual and atypical behaviors, Daniel begins to become suspicious. The pet cat hisses at her, her shoes don’t fit, and she eats chocolate, which she previously despised. Daniel becomes convinced this woman is not Liz and becomes unhinged, shooting a suspect during an ordinary traffic stop. When her father (Defoe) tells Liz to leave him, she stands by Daniel and then tells her father about a strange dream in which dogs ruled the world and treated people like animals, which is why she started eating chocolate.
Daniel refuses to eat and eventually asks Liz to cook one of her fingers for him, which she does. The episode ends with Daniel’s obsession taking control and his delusion taking on a (his) reality.
The final installment is “RMF Eats a Sandwich”. Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are members of a sex cult led by Omi (Defoe) and Aka (Chau) who have set Emily and Andrew off on a quest to find a woman who is able to raise the dead. Using very specific parameters, including the fact that their quarry has a dead twin, the two follow down fruitless leads until a stranger, Rebecca (Qualley), approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth is the person they are looking for. When they are skeptical, she tells the story of how her sister raised her from the dead after she leapt into a drained pool—so technically, she was dead. Emily secretly visits the home of her first husband Joseph (Joe Alwyn) and child (Merah Benoit).
Andrew is still skeptical of Rebecca. The two return to Omi’s compound where they both make love to him. On a return visit, Joe persuades Emily to come in for a drink. She does and he drugs and seduces her. Discovering her “impurity” Omi and Aka expel her from the compound and Andrew abandons her. Desperate, Emily hunts up Rebecca who points her toward her twin Ruth and sacrifices herself to fulfill the prophecy. Emily discovers Ruth is the real deal, drugs her and prepares to return to the compound in triumph when the unthinkable happens.
Taken separately, these three tales are strange stand-alone psychological forays but taken together, they collectively weave bizarre connections between the main trio of actors and the roles—or rather archetypes—they portray. Defoe always seems to be a father figure, Plemons the son, and Qualley and Chau—interchangeably—the mother and wife. While they are absurdist black comedies bordering on the surreal, the RMF stories touch upon the most common human weaknesses and frailties.
Robert will do anything to please Raymond in the first segment, as Emily will do to please Omi—her father/god figure. At first, Robert refuses to kill a man, but in the face of Raymond’s rejection, he finds he will do anything. In the second segment, Liz will do anything to keep Daniel’s love. The power wielded by Daniel and the father figures is so formidable it will make its subject do anything to keep it.
Lanthimos, in some rather subtle ways, resembles the Vladimir Nabokov, who constructed his novels as elaborate puzzles and riddles. In his most infamous novel Lolita, the hero Humbert Humbert is a pedophile, yet through his word wizardry—and the adroit manipulation of an unreliable narrator—Nabokov makes him sympathetic. Lanthimos poses many similar riddles: who is RMF? In the first installment, why do Robert, Raymond, Rita, and the murdered man all have the same initials? Are they iterations of the same character? In the third installment, the viewer has to wonder who Rebecca is and why she points Emily toward her twin. How did she know about Emily’s quest? Was she a ghost?
While Qualley, Defoe, and Stone have previously appeared in Lanthimos’ films, this is Plemons’s first time working with him, and he is superb. Having to portray a psychotic, a zealot, and a supplicant, he displays tremendous range and superb command of his craft. He is a subtle and masterful actor who is sorely underrated. As always, Stone and Dafoe display fine comedic skills in their sometimes chillingly ruthless characters. They embody the Lanthimos ethos.
Lanthimos’ films are fun and entertaining but also, like a car accident on the side of the road, simultaneously difficult to watch and not to watch. Kinds of Kindness may be peripherally about kindness but is mostly about power, love, and sacrifice. It is both harrowingly delightful and insidiously haunting.