Yorgos Lanthimos is, above all else, a moral filmmaker who crafts parables full of deep meaning that can be easily misread as simplistic shock cinema by those only looking at the surface. And as he’s speaking to an American audience, his methods are rooted in exploiting their cultural discomfort. If Emily “Emma” Stone’s character in Poor Things achieved self-actualization at the business end of an AK or set of nunchucks, nothing would be particularly novel about her story. But because she fucks, hard and frequently, we respond with nervous energy: Placing heads in our hands, ejaculating laughter, and staging a well-timed and performative walkout with an unfinished popcorn bucket in hand. If Kant were around, he’d smile proudly at the application of the categorical imperative before reaching for the Kleenex — after all, they didn’t have shit that good in his day. What makes his latest film, Kinds of Kindness, different from the rest of his Hollywood works is that it bears so few of their creature comforts, which generally enable us to enjoy his parables from a distance. These characters drive recognizable cars, dress like (somewhat) normal people, and have regular jobs (up until they join cults and such). There’s no costume drama here; instead, it’s just thick, bitter, glorious, contemporary irony served in a three-hour heap.
This isn’t the first time Lanthimos has made a picture set in the states, and if this movie has any proper antecedent, it’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, with its brutal cruelty paired with its twisted sense of justice. Sacred Deer had a grounded creepiness: Its characters behaved stilted and awkwardly, but it told a relatively traditional story with a heightened aesthetic. Kinds of Kindness does away with any sense of “reality” early on, and each of its three stories feels like Lanthimos’s rejected scripts for Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot. The first story follows an essentially “kept” man (Jesse Plemons), who has everything from his reading material to his meals to his sex life planned out for him by his boss (Willem Dafoe) as his life unravels following his decision not to obey a particularly deadly dictate. The second features Plemons in a different role, playing an awkward and mournful cop who is reunited with his formerly-marooned wife (Stone) and notices that she’s not the same person, and puts her through cruel measures to determine whether or not this woman is his wife. The third follows a cult member (also Stone) who left her family behind to join a water-based sex cult as she hunts for the group’s would-be messiah and finds out that a veterinarian (Margaret Qualley) near her might be who she’s looking for, or at least that woman’s twin (Qualley) thinks she might be.
Each story escalates in intensity and absurdity. The first is pretty mild, at least by Lanthimos’ standards, where Plemons’ collapse into manic-obsessive chaos is the draw, even if it feels like it creeps by at a snail’s pace. Consider it altitude training for those who missed out on his earlier work or for those who need a refresher. The second seems to be more of the same until it flips on its head with a gag so downright absurd, funny, and out-of-nowhere that it practically changes the entire film’s tone (seriously, I do not think I have laughed harder at any scene in a movie this year). And the third fires on all cylinders, immersing you in the high strangeness of cult life and estrangement from the “real world” that its supernatural qualities – a lighter feature of the previous story – feel part and parcel of the milieu. And as we get further and further away from the chaos of reality and deeper into Lanthimos’ bizarro moral universe, the fucked-up Aesop-like nature of his work becomes more readily apparent. The stark photography pairs nicely with the increasingly exaggerated nature of each tale, and, even better, it serves to emphasize truly hilarious and sometimes incongruous detail – Stone’s purple Challenger in the third story, for example, which is always doing donuts into parking spaces in front of whatever cheap motel she’s staying in.
On the other hand, Lanthimos won’t provide the viewer with easy answers to the hard and often-obscured ethical and moral questions he raises, even if he (most likely) will entertain them and (also likely) thoroughly disgust them with the result. Only one of the stories has what I’d consider a kind of divine intervention in which a perfect set of circumstances saves a character from a genuinely miserable fate. Still, each is a meditation on the nature of “kindness,” as you might expect from a film with this title. Is one’s total surrender to the whims and wants of the powerful a form of kindness to one’s self? How much sacrifice is enough to prove something to someone? Are one’s intentions really going to justify terrible actions they’ve done to others? These aren’t particularly novel questions, but in Lanthimos’s hands, they’re given genuinely discomfiting life, realized by an absurdly talented ensemble. Each of the characters played by the main members of the ensemble echo throughout – Joe Alwyn, for instance, is an antique dealer in the first, a passenger in a traffic stop in the second, and finally, Stone’s estranged husband in the third – and how Lanthimos styles these characters in their individual segments ripples and rhymes with what follows it.
Yet Kinds of Kindness is perhaps best interpreted as a survey of bad options, an ironic twist on the very nature of that ideal. It’s a thin line between kindness and cruelty, and Lanthimos is interested in everything between their two most extreme forms. This leads him down dark paths – though it’s plenty entertaining, the director’s not playing around with the “I-Need-A-Shower” levels of ick that one will walk out of the theater with. But, again, the content serves a purpose, much as the heightened and often brutish examples presented to us in parables biblical and otherwise do in their own way. There are plenty of things to glean from Kinds of Kindness, especially if you’re looking for a great list of things not to do when presented with a moral question, but I don’t think a kind of nihilism is one of them. Lanthimos spent his last film celebrating our species’ capacity for self-discovery and the creation of identity, and it’s only fitting that he be allowed to observe the foibles and follies of the people trapped within these tales in an unsparing fashion, as they try to find some locus of control – some way to shape reality in the way they want – and are unmoored by their faults.