Sydney Film Festival Review - Kinds of Kindness

 

“Open your eyes, and look clearly at what’s going on around you. We might all be in danger.”

Absurd, offbeat and detached, Kinds of Kindness is a twisted triptych of disturbing tales from the strange deadpan peculiar mind of Yorgos Lanthimos as he directs an ensemble led by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in three stories that are darkly humorous, surreal, disquieting and uncomfortable, with moments ranging from depressing to distressing to disturbing but never disinteresting. 

Discussion Points:

Yorgos Lanthimos is a peculiar weirdo. His films are offbeat, darkly humorous (often to the point of cruelty), discomforting, and focus on psychosexual dependency, power struggles and self destructive cycles of control and chaos. Kinds of Kindness is a triptych of three vignettes that are always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both restrained yet excessive at the same time. Featuring the same cast across the three stories (Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn) it sometimes struggles to get you truly invested as the stories feel limited in time frame and scope, yet Lanthimos and co-writer Filippou never bore you. I was consistently engaged, confused, concerned, entranced, and overwhelmed. I would rank the vignettes as chapter 1: The Death of R.M.F. being the strongest; chapter 3: R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich being the most interesting and would’ve loved to see more; and last chapter 2: R.M.F. goes Flying, which is definitely the strangest. Certainly an interesting film to see with an audience with plenty of audible gasps, scattered laughs, and a general atmosphere of awkward investment. Lanthimos is a director confident in his craft, and his whole creative team once again commits to his singular vision, with Jesse Plemons really standing out (in his first collaboration with Lanthimos - and I expect many more). Visually grabbing, sharply edited, and always off-kilter, I appreciated it more as an arthouse film than enjoyed it as a piece of entertainment.