Kinds of Kindness review – ‘shot through with kinky sex, grisly tests of character and glib punchlines’
Kinds of Kindness (18) ****
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (15) ***
Just six months on from Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos re-unites once more with Emma Stone for Kinds of Kindness, a deliciously sick and twisted triptych of strange tales that hark back to the Greek director’s “Weird Wave” origins. Co-written with his Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster collaborator Efthimis Filippou, the film is like an old-fashioned anthology film, except the same core cast – Stone, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley – play different roles in each story, all of them cryptically linked by the same titular character whose identity is only revealed in a closing credits stinger.
In the first story, titled “The Death of R.M.F.”, Plemons takes the lead as Robert, a man whose comfortably affluent lifestyle with his wife Sarah (Chau) is controlled by his boss and benefactor Raymond (Dafoe). Raymond owns an architecture firm, but he’s more interested in constructing the reality of those around him, making his own wife (Qualley) provide status updates on her daily interactions and engineering the entire shape of Robert’s existence. He also gifts Robert a collection of destruction-themed sporting memorabilia that includes one of John McEnroe’s smashed tennis rackets and doomed Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna’s crash helmet – a portent of things to come, perhaps, when Robert botches a staged car crash and baulks at repeating the incident to Raymond’s satisfaction. Suddenly out of favour, he finds his highly ordered life spinning out of control and into the orbit of an optician (Stone) whose existence mirrors his own.
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Hide AdThat doubling theme continues into the next story, “R.M.F. is Flying”, a kind of doppelgänger/Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style tale about a cop (Plemons) who becomes increasingly convinced that his formerly missing wife (Stone) is an imposter after she’s found following a mysterious disappearance at sea. It continues too into the third story, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, with Stone this time taking the lead as a member of a sex and wellness cult tasked by its leaders (Dafoe and Chau) with tracking down their very own messiah using very specific criteria: they must be a twin with a deceased sibling, they must weigh approximately 130lbs; they must be able to bring the dead back to life.
To what extent we’re meant to figure out the connections between all three films is up for debate. The violent disruption of weirdly cloistered worlds is a favourite theme of Lanthimos’ and each of the stories in Kinds of Kindness is shot through with kinky sex, grisly tests of character and glib (and sometimes bloody) punchlines to better aid its parable-like exploration of humanity’s fascination with domineering figures. The arch tone will also be familiar to anyone who’s encountered his work before, but his actors are so good at rooting irony in something plausibly human that Lanthimos’s theatre of cruelty never becomes an endurance test.
Stone is especially good in the final story at connecting her character’s misguided pursuit of a higher calling with her curious feelings towards the family she’s abandoned. A fearless actress at the best of times, it’s another fine showcase for the recent Oscar winner. It’s Plemons, though, who emerges as the film’s star. With his mix of Matt Damon-style boyishness and Philip Seymour Hoffman-style gravitas, he’s long been a commanding supporting player, but his range comes into play in a big way across all three stories. In a film about domination, he does just that.
There’s something to be said for the way Hollywood’s ageing crop of auteurs are starting to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to funding dream projects deemed too risky by the studios. Frances Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis will be with us in September, but before that comes Kevin Costner’s western throwback Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, the first instalment of a projected four-part epic about the settlement of the frontier. If the title sounds cumbersome, it serves a useful purpose: you know you’re in for a long haul so you might as well settle in and soak up a type of filmmaking that’s been on its way out for decades, but still offers myriad pleasures when done well. And Costner (who’s ploughed $20m of his own money into it) mostly knows how to do this stuff well. Yes, there are longueurs across its 180-minute running time that suggest some structural flaws, but its stateliness is also part of its appeal, allowing time to set up various narrative strands that explore the dilemmas of the blinkered white settlers who’ve bought into the dream of a new settlement – the titular Horizon – and the indigenous inhabitants of the land torn between violently driving them off and acknowledging the unstoppable onslaught of what we know is on the way.
In lieu of an A-list cast (Sam Worthington, Sienna Miller and Luke Wilson are the most recognisable names here), Costner may push things a bit far by delaying his own arrival onscreen until the hour mark. Nevertheless, when he does show up, it’s a relief to find him not in the saintly mode of his Oscar-garlanded Dances with Wolves, but playing someone more akin to the taciturn, badass gunslinger of his brutal, slow-burning 2003 western Open Range. It’s just a shame that once he’s got the film going, he doesn’t end on a good cliff-hanger, choosing instead to preview part two (out in August) with a very bizarre extended montage of action clips.
Both films are in cinemas from 28 June.