At The Movies: Kinds Of Kindness tears down love, free will and family

Kinds Of Kindness (R21)

164 minutes, opens at The Projector on Aug 29
★★★★☆

The story: In three loosely connected short films co-written and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, a cast that includes Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Joe Alwyn plays different roles. In the first story, The Death Of R.M.F., each detail of Robert’s (Plemons) life has been planned by his boss Raymond (Dafoe). His diet, the frequency of intercourse with his wife Sarah (Chau) and other activities are written out for him to follow. After Robert disobeys a command he deems too extreme, Raymond fires him. In R.M.F Is Flying, marine biologist Liz (Stone) disappears on an expedition. Her husband Daniel (Plemons), a police officer, is distraught. When he hears that Liz has been found, he is overjoyed, but the Liz who returns is not the same person who left. In R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich, Omi (Dafoe) and his wife Aka (Chau) are leaders of a cult whose members include Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons). The couple hope to fulfil a prophecy by finding a person with the gift of resurrecting the dead.

Welcome to the world of Greek film-maker Lanthimos. In screenplays that he co-writes with frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, one finds a universe that looks exactly like one’s own – except for a subset of rules that are bonkers, but which characters accept as normal operating principles.

In black comedy The Lobster (2015), single people have to find a partner or the autocratic government will turn them into animals. In the psychological horror The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (2017), an implacable deity from antiquity, taking the form of a creepy teen, makes life hell for an American surgeon and his family.

The point of Lanthimos’ alternative worlds is parody, but his parodic targets are never explicitly stated, and instead are glimpsed through layers of bone-dry absurdist humour or horror.

In three-film anthology Kinds Of Kindness, he takes potshots at everything from the illusion of free will (The Death Of R.M.F.) to the circular arguments that underpin religion (R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich) to the shallow, selfish way humans define the people they love (R.M.F. Is Flying).

Or they could be none of those things because Lanthimos makes sure that every scene trips lightly into the next, so no puzzle-solving is required to enjoy the stories. Once the ground rules are understood, the story developments flow suspensefully.

On the surface, the goings-on might feel like nonsense, but the emotional beats under them are easily identifiable and make sense.

It helps that the cast is of such high quality, especially Plemons.

His face and mannerisms are tailor-made for the light-dark nature of Lanthimos material. The actor, whose physical appearance is a collage of every white American male existing today, can snap from amiable to menacing in an instant. That ability has landed him mostly villain roles, but as a leading man, his chameleon quality makes him eminently watchable.

This is an art-house work that has little of the buzzing comic energy, extravagant set design and sparkling dialogue of Lanthimos films adapted from the work of other writers, such as the Oscar-winning The Favourite (2018) or Poor Things (2023), also starring Stone.

Kinds Of Kindness is the placid sibling of those films and, in its clinical but no less gory and explicit explorations of sex, love and family, is as much a Lanthimos work as they are.

Hot take: With a stellar cast in hand, Lanthimos takes viewers into an alternate universe filled with doppelgangers, corpse revivers and deranged husbands.