Yorgos Lanthimos Has No Interest in Remaining Mainstream

Within the first few seconds of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, the audience at my Cannes press screening erupted into applause. I think the reasons for that are twofold: Some were probably excited for another Lanthimos–Emma Stone joint after the huge success of Poor Things, but I suspect that most were simply pumped up by the movie’s very punchy opening to the sounds of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The tune seemed likely to suit the material—“Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you” is a view of the world that echoes in many of the Greek filmmaker’s movies, in which human relationships are power negotiations and some version of pleasure is derived by both sides of these unequal dynamics, at least for some time.

Indeed, the shoe fits to an extent. Kinds of Kindness is a triptych presenting its three stories one after the other, all interpreted by the same group of brilliant actors and exploring, you guessed it, the twisted ways in which we try to show or receive kindness. Perhaps I would have chosen the arguably less cool 10cc song “The Things We Do for Love” for the opener instead, since each of these tales is more specifically about what our need for affection and our fear of loneliness make us capable of. Still, who am I to disagree? In the first story, we follow Robert (Jesse Plemons) as he leads a seemingly normal life until we find out that his every move is dictated to him by the mysterious Raymond (Willem Dafoe), from what Robert must have for breakfast to the hour at which he needs to have sex with his wife to whether the couple should try to have children. Robert is happy to obey, but one day, he meets his limit, and problems arise. Plemons brings an incredibly detailed subtlety to what could easily have been a thankless, absurd part, progressively releasing the free will that Robert had so far been denying himself, resulting in frustration and utter panic. But this is a Lanthimos film—one that he cowrote with Efthimis Filippou, the screenwriting partner of his earlier, absurdist days, on films such as The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer—so of course Robert comes to miss his subjugation and soon tries to earn it back.

Up to this point, it seems to be Lanthimos’s standard Greek Weird Wave territory. But if this plot recalls Lanthimos’s breakthrough, Dogtooth, in which a father controls his children by teaching them his own deranged version of the things of life, this first segment, just as the two others in Kinds of Kindness, is rather toothless. What made the director’s earlier films affecting beyond their shock value was the deep well of feeling hidden under their sharp exteriors. One felt a real sense of threat when watching the manipulated sisters in Dogtooth and hoped for their liberation as they inevitably started wondering about the world outside their home. Here, the critique of society and its rules is more tongue-in-cheek and schematic, as though these characters aren’t people but concepts brought to life. The ideas are undeniably smart and hard to argue with—it’s definitely embarrassing and shocking how willing we are to forgo our own morals in order to be part of a group—but we don’t get to care much about their implications for the characters or ourselves.

Instead of deeply caring, we may (or may not) laugh. In each of these tales, Lanthimos stays at an ironic distance from his characters as they experience degradation and terror, and his scathing social commentary is played for humor rather than to make the viewer question their own people-pleasing tendencies. In the second story, Plemons plays a cop struggling with the disappearance of his wife, Liz (Stone), after she embarked on an expedition. Although his friends, a couple played by Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie, try to be supportive, they understandably feel embarrassed when he begs them to watch their four-way sex tape together as a way to remember her. Lanthimos seizes this opportunity to get graphic, for seemingly no better reason than to shock his audience in the same inoffensive way he did with the sex scenes in Poor Things. It is a little funny the first time, but this kind of easy, sudden, and supposedly amusing provocation characterizes the entirety of Kinds of Kindness, which only looks like a return to the director’s acerbic origins but in reality is just as self-satisfied and facile as his previous effort. Later in the second tale, moments of cruel gore serve the same titillating function and hammer the point that a desire for acceptance can lead us to self-mutilation—in case you didn’t get it from the first story.

The film’s last episode feels like an amalgam of Lanthimos and Filippou’s greatest hits, blending the dark mysteries of death, faith, and family, but the final result is less compelling than the sum of its parts. Stone is part of a cult (led by Dafoe, as well as Hong Chau), and together with Plemons, she is searching for a prophesied healer said to be able to bring people back from the dead. As she makes a serious sacrifice for the cause, she encounters other people just as willing to pay a heavy price for the chance to join a community and make sense of their pain and disappointment. She also proves capable of violence in pursuit of her goal, as does her estranged husband (Joe Alwyn) in an attempt to win her love back, in yet another disturbing but also redundant moment. All the characters throughout Kinds of Kindness are cut from the same satirical, condescending cloth. Each humiliation and unlucky twist of fate feels like another witticism from Lanthimos, eliciting little more than a chuckle and once again reminding us of how ridiculous our despair and solitude make us. Even the element of chance, more present in this third chapter, fails to surprise and instead accentuates the smugness of the filmmaker’s approach; he crushes his characters like ants anytime he feels like it.

In a film that’s ultimately all shock and little awe—all surface and little depth—the most gratifying element is the shape-shifting the actors engage in as they interpret different characters. Although they’re all more than up to the task—and the hair and makeup department has a lot of fun with them—it is Plemons who demonstrates, once again, that he is one of the best American actors working today. This won’t be too much of a surprise to those who have witnessed his impressive feat of transformation in the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister,” in which he played a highly introverted nerd who turned into a confident womanizer and warrior inside the virtual reality game he created. Here in Kinds of Kindness, moving from an uptight husband to a Matt Damon look-alike cop and finally becoming a lanky, modern hippy full of quiet swagger, Plemons gives dimension and specificity to each of these people, despite the disregard that the film has for their interiority and feelings. That’s the kind of greatness sweet dreams are made of.

Manuela Lazic is a French writer based in London who primarily covers film.