Yorgos Lanthimos has made a new film with a star cast. In three absurd episodes he revolves around addictions and desire.
What do Emily (Emma Stone) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) expect from the water in the pool in front of them? Photo: Walt Disney Germany
Only a few months have passed since Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark feminist take on the Frankenstein story surprisingly received eleven Oscar nominations. The eventually four-time award-winning ‘Poor Things’ became the Greek director’s most successful film to date. And so it seemed that one of the leading exponents of the subversive “Greek Weird Wave” movement had finally arrived in Hollywood.
As always when filmmakers experience such a development, success in the mainstream world comes with certain concerns. About whether the oddities and, in the case of Yorgos Lanthimos, the bulkiness of his materials, which are actually at odds with mass suitability, are now over. ‘Kinds of Kindness’, with which he now returns to the cinemas, makes these doubts seem downright ridiculous.
With this, at least at first glance, utterly absurd anthology film, Yorgos Lanthimos has perhaps reached his best form as a filmmaker, whose greatest fascination is with the well-known but strangely enough seldom questioned human idiosyncrasies.
‘Kinds of Kindness’ is an eclectic work in the best sense of the word: the first collaboration with original screenwriter Efthimis Filippou since “The lobster” clearly reflects on the unruly beginnings of his career. The three curious short stories that make up the new film are themselves solipsistic spectacles in which surreal scenarios full of strange outbursts of violence and bizarre humor combine to create seemingly otherworldly grotesques.
His superior determines the arbitrary rules
But rather than falling into the sometimes fragile self-referentiality of his early works, some of which are hard to relate to our reality, the film as a whole is marked by a greater connectivity. Like Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness is also open to contemporary interpretations, but remains further removed from being tied to a single, stringent narrative or even a reconciling outcome.
The idiosyncratic trilogy opens with the suffering of full-time, middle-aged lackey Robert (Jesse Plemons), who is controlled in every area of his life by his sinister boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Whether it’s the exact ingredients of his breakfast, his sex life with his wife Sarah (Hong Chau), chosen by Raymond, or the composition of his wardrobe, his superior not only knows everything, but also makes the arbitrary rules.
Robert’s real ordeal, however, begins when he disobeys an order from the boss for the first time: after refusing to ram another vehicle carrying a man with a death wish at high speed, Raymond withdraws from his life.
Left to his own devices, Robert is unable to make even the smallest decisions on his own and ultimately does everything he can to get back under the thumb of his former leader. His free will seems too corrupted to enjoy or even endure his newfound freedom.
A Biblical Scenario of Sacrifice and Resurrection
What emerges here will eventually emerge as the overarching theme of Kinds of Kindness: Efthimis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos revolve around interpersonal dependencies that go as far as self-sacrifice with a mixture of black humor and mocking sharpness that is at least as oppressive as it is funny. The middle episode is devoted to this in amorous contexts. The wife of police officer Daniel (Jesse Plemons) has been missing at sea some time ago, and since then he has only gone about his work with a lack of care, even thinking he recognizes his missing wife in random suspects.
When Liz (Emma Stone) is actually tracked down and returns to their shared home, but suddenly exhibits different food and clothing preferences, Daniel suspects he may now be dealing with a doppelganger.
Liz is a marine biologist whose traumatic experiences on a desert island are woven into the action through black-and-white flashbacks. No effort seems too great to prove herself to her lover as the real Liz. Not even when he demands that she prepare one of her fingers as a meal for him. The situation escalates further and further until a finale that can almost be read as a biblical scenario of sacrifice and resurrection, in which Liz – cleansed of the ‘sin’ of her own characteristics that her partner considers undesirable – returns as a new, old version of herself.
In ‘Kinds of Kindness’, however, the absurdity of the characters involved is made clear not only by the narrative direction the parable-like vignettes take, but also by the ironic imagery of Robbie Ryan’s camera and the no less mischievous cutaways of the editor, Yorgos Mavropsaridis.
A sinewy wannabe gigolo
In the last short film, for example, the macabre quest of the two cult members Emily (Emma Steen) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) search for a chosen young woman who supposedly has the power to bring the dead back to life. Only after their last hope, Anna (Hunter Schafer), fails in such an attempt at the morgue and proves to be a disappointment, does it become clear on whose orders they are actually acting.
A brief stretch later, Guru Omi (Willem Dafoe), desperate to appear young, is first seen lounging on a bed in ridiculously lascivious fashion like a wiry wannabe gigolo awaiting a visit from his next loyal follower (or follower), while Andrew and Emily vainly try to outdo each other. “Kinds of Kindness” is not only delightfully amusing about how easily we’re willing to give up our own kindness, but also about whom.
Although this last episode represents the weakest part of the triad, as the space for bizarre exaggeration in religious-spiritual areas is notoriously limited, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ninth feature sends its audience on a desperate search for confirmation as a strikingly painful satire. It is precisely through the absurdity of the scenarios, the excessive violence and the strange sexuality that the arbitrariness with which rules are sometimes set in work, relationships or other interpersonal contexts is effectively demonstrated.
Just like the twists we still make for the coveted extrinsic validation, the assertion in a social structure. Because as the Eurythmics say, whose most famous song opens the film: That’s what sweet dreams seem to be made of, who am I to resist?
If we According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, cinema tells us what we should desire“Kindness” can be understood as an energetic invitation to question what we may only think we desire.