‘Kinds of Kindness’ Review: Domination and Submission Grab Hold in Fresh Triptych for the Lanthimos-pilled | Cannes

Remember the myriad of ways Queen Anne demanded affection from her court in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite? At one point, Lady Sarah exclaims that “love has boundaries,” to which the Queen responds that “it should not.” It’s not that you need any previous references to read or enjoy Lanthimos’ newest offering, but that was the exchange that came to me while watching the beginning of Kinds of Kindness, premiering in Competition at Cannes. In this three-part quirky anthology, power and love are exposed and exploited in typical Lanthimosian fashion: to their very limits.

Not many surprises here, when it comes to the cast, with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn playing three different characters each, but the stellar presence of Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie effectively reshuffles one’s expectations of their shared dynamics. What’s more interesting than simply working with an ensemble cast is the act of recasting each actor into a different role as if it was theater and every costume/hair change invites a reset. But Lanthimos knows well that film is not theater—no matter how many times his films get branded as ‘highly stylized’ or ‘Brechtian’—and trusts the audience enough to bring in their own readings and remnants from one story to the next. 

The same goes for the performances themselves: even the ‘newcomers’ blend in perfectly into that well-oiled machine of deadpan line delivery, snappy retorts, and expressing as little as possible. Lanthimos famously works around, not on the characters when it comes down to rehearsals and shooting and he has perfected that approach so well by now that the actors—now A-listers—become vessels for the film’s complex narrative drive. It has to be said this does not diminish the strength of their performances in the slightest, it just reframes the conversation from ‘Is this good or bad acting?’ to ‘Does it fit the film world or not?’ Luckily, with the help of Kinds of Kindness in particular, that world just keeps on expanding.

Behind the camera, Robbie Ryan once again makes use of wide lenses to elongate corridors and distort the spaces enough to lock the protagonists even tighter in their self-made prison. Visually, as well as conceptually, Kinds of Kindness takes cues from a single principle: repetition with a difference. Just like the actors shapeshift while staying the same, the long shots recast their sanguine warmth to fit each story. The three parts of the film are all dense with details and so tangled within a web of domination and submission, that it does the film little justice to simply recount the plot. But all three of them involve a man known only by his initials, R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos, a friend of the writers) and his very peripheral, non-speaking role contrasts with the naming of the chapters: “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. Flies,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich.”

First, we have a well-off corporate guy named Robert (Plemons), whose happy marriage to Sarah (Chau) and luxurious lifestyle are dictated from the shadows by Raymond (Dafoe), his Daddy Dom and employer. For ten years, every facet of Robert’s daily life has been decreed by Raymond and when the submissive decides to courageously set a boundary, we confirm that “love should not.” In the second installment, Plemons takes on a more passive role, that of a grieving police officer whose wife (Stone) has been missing for a long time. One day, she comes back and eats a whole chocolate cake in one sitting, despite having hated chocolate her whole life. Even worse, her shoes don’t fit and she smokes her first cigarette. Bizarre differences keep cropping up until everything crumbles: Lanthimos hits the sweet spot with every one of the stories by keeping them tight and neat—obstacle, climax, resolution—but fills that structure with more of his dark humor (and occasional gory shots).

While we have waited for nearly eight years to celebrate their reunion, Lanthimos and longtime collaborator Efthimis Phillipou again show that patience is a virtue. The script of Kinds of Kindness (previously titled R.M.F. or And.) has been gestating for seven years until the opportune moment came to go ahead and make it. Production on the new film began with the wrap of Poor Things and during its post, the cast and crew regrouped to realize a vision for a world of rules, sacrifices, and punishment. Echoes of The Lobster and Dogtooth ring loud enough in the way plot and atmosphere are tangled in the Greek director’s latest, but it is the mysterious precision of shorts like Neck Tie and Nimic that cuts right through the triptych.

The film’s final part is the one with the most ‘full-feature’ potential, where a quasi-spiritualistic sex-cult led by Aka (Chau) and Omi (Dafoe) is in search of their messiah. The first contestant is Anna (Hunter Schafer) who fits all the (obviously odd) criteria, but does not have the necessary supernatural powers. Tasked with the seemingly impossible are Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons), but this third story belongs to Stone, in perfect symmetry with Plemons’ lead in the first. Emily comes the closest a Lanthimos character has ever been to redemption when trying to break free from the cult and return to being a mother to her young girl.

Like all the characters, though, she hits an impasse that is also a point of no return; pain and transformation go hand in hand and no attempt to exit the strict social order goes unpunished: that we’ve known since Dogtooth. Even though Kinds of Kindness can feel familiar to a conditioned viewer, that familiarity resembles more the meeting of a twin you didn’t know you had. ‘Uncanny’ is another word that’s been used to death to describe the Lanthimos universe, but there is something invigorating and forever fresh in between the repetition and the difference; the kind of freshness that slightly stings.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival where Kinds of Kindness premiered in Competition. Searchlight Pictures will release the film in U.S. theaters on June 21, 2024.