Kinds of Kindness, a trio of tall tales from the often-tiresome mind of Yorgos Lanthimos, shows the Greek auteur at both his best and his worst. At times, this portmanteau picture is riveting, only for the writer-director to squander his audience’s interest and goodwill through his particular brand of cinematic trolling.
These stories largely feature the same cast, which is led by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, who won the Best Actress Oscar this year for her role in Lanthimos’s previous film, Poor Things.
In the first chapter, the pair play the victims of a controlling benefactor (Willem Dafoe) who is intent on staging a violent car crash. In the second, Plemons’ cop suspects that his wife (Stone) has been replaced by an imposter, since her feet are now “bigger… and softer, for some reason”. And in the concluding part, the stars search for a woman with the power to raise people from the dead.
For about half its length, the movie’s positives outweigh its negatives, helped by a brisk pace and Plemons’ fine work, before the balance tips, and the director’s shallow shock tactics start to overwhelm his storytelling.
To many, Lanthimos is a fearless film-maker blessed with the daring to go dark. To others, he is an adolescent edgelord who covers up his dearth of a genuine viewpoint by reaching for the nearest taboo. While that worked astonishingly well in his early calling card, Dogtooth (2009) – a disarmingly audacious black comedy evoking the Josef Fritzl case – none of his Hollywood films have come close. Here, the list of audience-baiting subjects deployed begins to look slightly desperate: cannibalism, date rape, domestic violence leading to miscarriage, forced abortions, the death of Ayrton Senna, dog sex, a dog’s paw being sliced open with a knife, a dog being hanged, and a woman cutting out her own liver.
The movie does have virtues to offset its shortcomings: Lanthimos effortlessly generates intrigue and dread, gets laughs when allowing the humour to grow from the characterisation, and explodes even the growing monotony with some showstopping moments.
But as with all his American movies, Kinds of Kindness is both unremittingly cruel and unstintingly self-satisfied. In the opening story, he invokes a particular kind of kindness – helping a hospital patient to use the bathroom – which then proves to be, with wearisome inevitability, merely a set-up to a Good Samaritan being robbed, and a man being tipped out of a wheelchair and run over. Though this triptych is far more entertaining than the interminable Poor Things, it just doesn’t have much to say, unless it’s “people are awful and so is everything else”.
Stone, who was the best thing about that Oscar-winning mess, has superb moments again here: planting pathos within the mandated deadpan delivery, frenziedly scrubbing herself in the bathtub after being assaulted, and negotiating the fallout from domestic violence using the language of abuse. But once more she is in a Lanthimos film that scarcely deserves her performance, because in the end he doesn’t care about his characters, and wants you to feel stupid for having done so.