Kinds of Kindness

★★★★

Everybody’s looking for something. This is the first thing we are greeted with in Yorgos Lanthimos’ sickly entertaining new feature “Kinds of Kindness” — the words of Eurythmics’ pulsing “Sweet Dreams” ringing through the studio logos; a sign to strap in and focus up, and an unexpected roadmap to understanding the delightfully twisted, darkly comic triptych fable to come. In this collection of three gruesome and uncomfortably funny stories, the unifying idea is that of love being control, and kindness a destructive force. Who am I to disagree?

In the first of these stories, “The Death of R.M.F.,” Robert (Jesse Plemons) is a businessman whose entire life is dictated by his overbearing boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Robert is told what to wear, what to eat, how often he can make love to his wife (Hong Chau), what time he is to read Anna Karenina at night. His loyalty is tested by Raymond’s latest order: to murder a man named R.M.F. in an orchestrated car crash.

“Kinds of Kindness” is most playful in this first section. In standard fashion, Lanthimos quickly establishes a heightened reality of commonplace oddity and strange behaviours, and allows the inherent humour of the story’s premise to guide the film. Plemons is wonderfully dry; pathetic and submissive without teetering into exaggerated farce. It’s his best performance in the film. Dafoe is, as always, immeasurably watchable; blunt, stern, with an alluring warmth. There’s a matter-of-fact-ness to Lanthimos’ dialogue and storytelling inclinations that are especially befitting to this story’s premise. Robert is instructed by Raymond to order a non-alcoholic beverage from a restaurant bar; he instead orders a whisky, and the bartender stares blankly until Robert corrects to a Virgin Mary. The hilariously heightened, bizarre world crafted in this first segment remains in place through the entirety of “Kinds of Kindness,” though it perhaps does not feel quite as rife with comedic possibility once Robert’s tale has concluded.

In the second story, “R.M.F. is Flying,” Daniel (Jesse Plemons) is a police officer whose wife, Liz (Emma Stone), returns home from being lost-at-sea. However, her strange and uncharacteristic behaviour soon leads Daniel to suspect that this woman may not be his wife at all. Ultimately, Daniel asks her to perform disturbing acts of self-harm to test her love and loyalty.

In many respects, “Kinds of Kindness” is its most self-assured here; the hybrid of provocative sexual tension and stomach-churning violence most in-line with the filmmaker’s usual tendencies. Stone plays a double-edged sword: innocuous enough to make us doubt Daniel’s suspicions, and enigmatic enough to affirm them. Plemons, on the other hand, plays the puzzled everyman completely straight…until he makes a sharp turn. At a routine traffic stop, Daniel shoots a man (Joe Alwyn) through the hand, and then rushes over to lick the blood from his palm. The grotesque violence in this story is counter-balanced by its humour, finding twisted joy in the sick and sexual. Graphic nudity is notably sparse, but this story enjoys its raunchy subject matter with glimpses into the delightfully strange personal lives of Daniel and Liz. For a premise that demands a more active, inquisitive viewer than the story that precedes it, this tale ends with a memorably striking final note that puts a wonderfully Lanthimosian spin on the whole thing, wrapping the story up in a neat little bow.

In the film’s final fable, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Emily (Emma Stone) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) are cult members searching for a woman with the supernatural ability to reanimate the dead. While Emily deals with her estranged husband (Joe Alwyn) and her devotion to cult leader Omi (Willem Dafoe), she believes she has finally found this person in veterinarian Ruth (Margaret Qualley).

The most narratively substantial story in the film, this tale refocuses Stone as the leading player rather than Plemons. Something dangerous and unpredictable simmers not far below Stone’s outwardly personable performance, while Plemons — under-utilized and infrequently seen here for a film that positions itself as “three Jesse Plemons’s” — is pleasantly ordinary. Despite its supernatural leanings, this story is most disturbing in ways grounded in reality. Sexual violence, sacrificial cult rituals, a gnarly suicide; this story is markedly less humorous than its predecessors, but no less bizarrely heightened in its reality. Emily aggressively skids around the road in a purple Dodge Challenger to no protestation, and dances in a parking lot to COBRAH’s “Brand New Bitch” with flailing abandon. Still, this final story carries the most weight, and could feasibly sustain an entire feature itself. Stripped of the more brazenly eccentric elements of the first two stories, this chapter leaves room for the film’s core ideas to fully materialize.

If “Kinds of Kindness” feels disjointed or altogether fractured despite its cooly surgical aesthetic and recurring cast of performers, it is at least held together by a unified theme. Robert feels suffocated by his boss’ control over his life, until he no longer has it, at which point he craves Raymond’s form of twisted love. Daniel can only love the woman claiming to be his wife if he can exercise some form of dominance over her, dissatisfied until she begins literally harming herself. Emily is determined to violent extremes to win back the affections of a cult and its leader, while her estranged husband wishes to control her himself. If the balance between wanting to be loved and wanting to be controlled is the subtext, then kindness is on the surface. Acts small and large done in the name of good, of self-actualization or of affection, are overtly heinous, grisly deeds, while others are of no significance but done with pure intentions.

So again we turn to Eurythmics. Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to be used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be abused.

There is always a slight dissatisfaction in anthology storytelling. Here, however, the gaps between these stories feel so narrow the fables become like a deck of cards, characters reshuffled into new circumstances. Each new performance becomes like an additional shade of the previous character, until there is one singular story being told. The balance between love and control, the malleability of kindness. If Yorgos Lanthimos is to be believed, this is the stuff sweet dreams are made of.