Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, the twisted tale of a Victorian woman with the brain of a baby who experiences a profound sexual awakening, was critically lauded and won four Oscars, but also proved challenging for some cinemagoers. However, much like the Greek auteur’s madcap period drama The Favourite, it feels almost conventional when compared to his earlier work – releases like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster or Dogtooth. The latter three were co-authored by Lanthimos and his frequent collaborator Efthymis Filippou, and it is with him that the director reunites for his latest head-scratcher, which has just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival: the bizarrely brilliant and somewhat cryptically named Kinds of Kindness. And frankly, it makes Poor Things look like a Disney movie.
It’s a fable made up of three delicious, confounding, interconnected stories. In the first segment, titled “The death of RMF”, Jesse Plemons plays a lackey under the thumb of his tyrannical boss (Willem Dafoe), one who exerts complete control over every aspect of his life, including his relationship with his wife (Hong Chau). But when he’s asked to do something truly unthinkable, he tries to release himself from his shackles – and discovers that another woman (Emma Stone) is in exactly the same position. The only thing is, once he gets a taste of freedom, he’s not sure he wants it anymore.
The message here – that most of us, while fighting for our own free will, are fairly content, even reassured, to be told what to do (as we were during the many pandemic-induced lockdowns), and wouldn’t know what to do with real freedom if we got it – was fairly clear to me, though the moral of the next section, “RMF is flying”, is murkier: in this portion, which may remind viewers of Garth Davis’s Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal vehicle Foe and the Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett-starring Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea”, Plemons reappears as a policeman, the tormented husband of a woman (Emma Stone) who is lost at sea. When she returns, he’s convinced that something is terribly wrong – she seems out of sorts; her shoes don’t fit her; she once hated chocolate, but now craves it. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she’s an imposter – and dares her to prove her love to him in increasingly brutal ways.
Similar ideas of power and control – of exerting it, of escaping from it – also permeate the third story, hilariously called “RMF eats a sandwich”. (You’ll have to watch to the end to find out why.) In it, Plemons and Stone appear as two eccentric cult members who serve a pair of messianic leaders (Dafoe and Chau) and are on the hunt for a saviour who has the power to bring people back to life. Hunter Schafer appears as a potential candidate for the role in an all-too-brief cameo, after which the community’s hopes hinge on Margaret Qualley, in the part of two beguiling twin sisters. All the while, Stone’s character seems riddled with guilt at having abandoned her daughter (Merah Benoit) and husband (Joe Alwyn) for her new life – though, when she does briefly return to them, we get a sense of why she might have left in the first place.
What these three tales actually mean when they’re brought together is up to you – and that, ultimately, is what makes this film so exciting. At a time when cinema is often maddeningly simplistic or prescriptive, Kinds of Kindness delights in its own ambiguity. It also provides no shortage of things to get your teeth into: supremely committed and off-kilter performances from the entire ensemble; the fleeting presence of the mysterious RMF, a crucial but peripheral character who bookends the film as a whole; plenty of Easter eggs for the viewers watching most closely (at the early screening I went to, whispers went around about certain props which reappear across the three stories, and what they could mean); and countless moments which made me genuinely shout out in horror. Across its almost-three-hour-long run time, an inordinate amount of blood is spilt, limbs broken, appendages axed, shots fired and wounds licked with relish.
While most of these sequences are shocking, a few are incredibly, diabolically funny, and it’s a joy to see Lanthimos having such a blast. An industry favourite who seems to be only a feature or two away from a deluge of Oscars, having been nominated five times over the past seven years, the filmmaker could easily have pandered to Hollywood with something more accessible. Instead, he’s taken a big swing, and provided a head-spinning big-screen experience that is about as far from awards bait as it’s possible to get.
I suspect it’s a film that many will find alienating, or frustrating for its lack of straightforward answers, or simply too excruciating to enjoy. But, since seeing it, it’s one I haven’t been able to get out of my head – the more I think about it, the more connections I find, the more convoluted theories I have. It’s a release that’s guaranteed to inspire obsessive Reddit threads, one which demands to be discussed, and one which should be watched on repeat and dissected frame by frame. Cult classic status looms – and isn’t that so much cooler than a shelf full of statuettes?
Kinds of Kindness will arrive in cinemas in the UK from 28 June.