Reconnecting with his roots as part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave, director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest is the three-part anthology film “Kinds of Kindness” — a stumbling victory lap following the Oscar-winning success of his more selectively edgy “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.”
It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything. I take it as a heartening sign of nerve that Lanthimos even went into production with this script, co-written with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou.
As with Lanthimos’ previous works, we learn the rules of societal engagement as we go. In the first fable, Plemons plays a longtime employee of a wealthy man of business (business unspecified), assigned by the boss to execute mysterious and potentially lethal tasks such as ramming someone’s car and killing the driver. This underling has been stripped of all agency, with his employer (Willem Dafoe) dictating his every daily move, requiring him to fornicate with his wife (Hong Chau) at a specific time of day, and laying out a clinically precise nutritional regimen.
Things are even more insidious underneath the surface. The worm turns, eventually. But in Lanthimos’ icily calm depiction of masters, servants and a heartless status quo, there’s basically no wiggle room.
The actors play new characters in fables two and three. In the second one, Plemons is a grieving police officer whose marine biologist wife (Stone) has been shipwrecked and presumed lost. Rescued at last, she returns home in an altered state suggesting cannibalistic appetites, a taste for sexual violence and the possibility that she is a double — a pretender. Is the real marine biologist still at large? En route to a nominally happy ending, and the ironic brand of kindness indicated by the title, husband subjects wife, or wife’s double, to brutal personality tests involving dismemberment, disemboweling and such. Like the Nick Lowe song said: cruel to be kind, in the right measure.
The doppelganger conceit continues with the third fable, in which a purity cult (leader played by Dafoe) sends two of its members (Stone and Plemons) on a search for a messiah who can reanimate the dead. This one takes place in a world ruled by dogs, and where the tears of the cult leaders provide the drinking water for the community. Filmed in and around New Orleans, “Kinds of Kindness” establishes varying baselines of normalcy, though clearly we’re dealing with a species — humans — too numb, and obedient, to realize what’s wrong.
From Lanthimos’ first international success with “Dogtooth” (2009) onward, the filmmaker’s vision of nightmarish family units and institutions make a mockery of free will. One film later, with “Alps” (2011), Lanthimos’ taste for 20th century absurdism had already become both an asset and a limitation, indebted to Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Eugene Ionesco’s surreal rebellions and Harold Pinter’s political allegories of fascism. These are fruitful inspirations, and when Lanthimos’ films work, they’re at once elusive, allusive and bracing, as well as actor-friendly.
When they don’t, you get “Kinds of Kindness,” three 20-minute notions taffy-pulled into 164 minutes. I laughed out loud exactly once, which, let’s face it, is one more laugh than some comedies I’ve seen lately. In the second segment, Plemons’ policeman character has his colleague (Mamoudou Athie) and the colleague’s wife (Margaret Qualley) over for a melancholy dinner, with the cop’s wife still missing presumed dead. The cop wants to spend a minute watching some old home-movie footage of he and his wife, in happier days. Reluctantly his guests consent, and what comes next is a perfectly timed sight gag straight out of the director’s debut feature: sharp, quick and brazen.
Precious little of “Kinds of Kindness” manages any one or two of those qualities. Better luck next time.
“Kinds of Kindness” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language)
Running time 2:44
How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 26
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
