KINDS OF KINDNESS— 2 STARS

Based on his filmography championing the eclectic and bizarre, notable filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos strikes me as an idea man. Now that he’s gilded with five career Oscar nominations for his work across The Lobster, The Favourite, and Poor Things, I’m betting he’s the kind of creator who walks into a pitch meeting now like Miles Finch from Elf. He probably has a little black book of musings and “great starts” starts that he’s “particularly psyched in his mind about,” any of which could elicit the same “Yes!” scream of self-approval that Miles belts out.

However, for many who drink different cups of tea, they’re going to hear some of Yorgos’s pitches and think they sound more on the level of Pete Gas’s flaky one, namely “a tribe of asparagus children who are self-conscious about the way their pee smells” from the same Elf scene. The thing is, unlike Pete’s pitch getting stared at and summarily dismissed, Lanthimos’s cache is getting pitches that sound like that bankrolled and made. Case in point, his new film Kinds of Kindness is a trio of such batty ideas collected into one film.

You read that right. A trio means three. Across its 165 ceaseless minutes, Kinds of Kindness is a triptych of three deranged stories each running about 50 minutes in length. The only commonality or connection is a dialogueless character’s (Yorgos Stefanakos) initials and the same prominent central cast– led by the combined 12 Oscar nominations and two wins between Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chao, and, last but not least, Lanthimos’ top muse Emma Stone– changing up roles and looks for each chapter. The result is about as sturdy as a model of a triangular prism made of toothpicks and marshmallows like the ones elementary students pieced together in their early geometry lessons on solid figures in math class.

In the first chunk of Kinds of Kindness, Robert (Plemons) fails at killing a middle-aged bearded man with the initials R.M.F. (if I had to guess: Random Motherfucker, because that’s what Stefanakos feels like) in an intentional car accident. The well-to-do and mustachioed married man had trouble stomaching being responsible for another man’s death. The “hit,” for lack of a better term, was ordered by Robert’s decadent and mysterious boss figure Raymond (Dafoe) who dictates every detail of his life right down to the menu and when to make love to his especially-chosen wife Sarah (Chao). After ten years in cahoots with Raymond, Robert is cut-off and cast out of his circle after the mistake, which sends his Sarah packing and him on a downward spiral. Only the appearance of a fetching new woman named Rita (Stone) perks the anguished Robert up.

The second and more nightmarish jaunt of the film leaps to a depressed and sensitive cop named Daniel (Plemons) who has been struggling with the disappearance of his ocean scientist wife Liz (Stone), feared lost at sea during a research expedition. While his superiors fret over his reduced effectiveness on the job, Daniel seeks and gains comfort from his squad partner (Mamoudou Athie of The Burial) and his wife (indie It Girl Margaret Qualley). The spicy rub there is Daniel, Liz, and this other couple were regular spouse-swapping swingers, making any nostalgic mourning tinged with more kink than sorrow. When Liz miraculously returns, the shock of it all breaks Daniel’s psyche where he’s convinced the woman returning is not his real wife.

Closing Kinds of Kindness is the duo of Emily and Andrew (Stone and Plemons) roaring around in a purple Dodge Challenger. They are traveling harbingers of a mysterious oceanside cult led by Omi and Aka (Dafoe and Chao) and bent on purity over disqualifying traits and lifestyles they deemed to be contamination. Emily and Andrew’s mission is investigate profiles of women rumored to have hands of healing powers strong enough for resurrection from death. Emily and Andrew test this theory and chosen candidates with corpses in morgues. Outside of the organization, Emily struggles letting go of the husband (Harriet villain Joe Alwyn) and young daughter she left to join this shady crusade.

Each chapter has their zany swerve at that magic 50-minute mark that throws viewers for a reflective loop while also grinding any earned momentum to a halt. The twists are so obscure, even by Lanthimos’ standards, that any salted suspension of disbelief strains credulity worth any investment in by the time the hammer falls for a mid-movie roll of credits and a hard transition. That kind of abruptness happens three times, sometimes right when a tangential storyline was hitting a grove, making the shifts to entire new settings and characters jarring and, worse, defeating.

Somewhere in the messy milieu set to a musical score from Jesrkin Fendrix (Poor Things) that sounds like a cat walking across a piano while the London Voices try to unnerve you with emphasized gibberish, a few common character challenges percolate and echo. Please know that those two verbs ending the last sentence are a long was from “resonate” and are very difficult to, when it’s all said and done, consider remotely worthwhile. Since this is “Every Movie Has a Lesson,” they land like this below.

LESSON #1: WHAT KIND OF HOLD CAN A PERSON HAVE OVER ANOTHER?-- All three portions of Kinds of Kindness create mild suspense with domineering figures–all male and in the forms of bosses, spouses, or cult leaders– having unspecified powerful mental and physical influence over other characters. In two of the three stanzas, the enigmatic “king of creepy” Willem Dafoe is the ideal delivery device for that type of aura. In addition, sex is always on the menu in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, making him the real “Greek Freak” rather than some tall MVP basketball player dominating the paint and perimeter in Milwaukee. Nevertheless, characters bite, scratch, claw, and ultimately kill to stay in good graces of their puppeteers, which leads to the second challenge.

LESSON #2: DISAPPOINTMENT AND OSTRACIZATION– The margin for error or deviation among the three sets of characters in Kinds of Kindness is infinitesimal. Actions of independence are seen as flaws that get people removed from the leader’s circle lined with lavish comfort and perceived acceptance. Any querries for deep discussion or reasonable answers are stonewalled with dismissive gesture of vocalized and feigned disappointment. Those ostracizations throughout Kinds of Kindness trigger the final and most damaging domino to fall.

LESSON #3: WHEN PARANOIA TAKES SOMEONE OVER– When any of the previously toxic bonds are severed in the film, liberating freedom is not the result. Instead, it’s an increase of the will-destroying paranoia that’s been festering since Lesson #1. The mindset and resulting desperate reactions of the castigated and ostracized people in Kinds of Kindness are likely the meaty parts of acting that drew this ensemble cast to the film. In that regard, the cast was ideally placed to roam the full stage space.

That’s part of the shame of Kinds of Kindness. These are excellent actors allowed to bring their most unhinged personality or performance choices to the forefront through strong location shooting in the New Orleans area and decent quirky costume work from Jennifer Johnson (I, Tonya). Notably, Jesse Plemons plays pathetic to perfection and Emma Stone can convey collapse better than houses of cards from the Guinness Book of World Records. All of the actors here are working for a director who will say yes to a bold choice and dare them to go further. Even Lanthimos tones down his calling cards of Robbie Ryan’s voyeuristic fisheye cinematography and his usual insistence on deadpan dialogue delivery, allowing actual emotive dialogue to come through. However, refreshing effort like that is wasted when the story platforms fail them, as they do here.

Therein lies the largest malignant malady of Lanthimos’ wannabe anthology epic. Because these three chapters are only 50 minutes, they writhe and eventually wither as unrefined and incomplete tangents, at best. The wild, rug-pull elements of WTF shock value land with repeated thuds in each part. All of this gives the pungent scent that the filmmaker had three cancelled or rejected pitch ideas and threw them together into this one silly pile instead of bothering to mold any of them to finished cinematic sculptures suitable for exhibition. 

The damning reason why is because, despite the present artistry and talent, none of three work or were worth expanding in the first place. Most movies, no matter if they are blockbusters or sourced from the top auteurs in the business like this one, can get away with one lost-cause guessing game plot for the sake of the endeavor or experiment. Even in the name of the blackest pitch black dark comedies, Kinds of Kindness tests tolerance by trying to push three wayward and wonky exertions down your throat. At that volume, constitutions check out and all the ambition fizzles out.