Review: Kinds of Kindness – The line between good and evil

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe

7/10

Coming from the deranged mind of director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, this time we have three times the treat from him: three separate stories, each close to an hour long and each featuring the same actors, making up this wild, wacky, and somewhat disjointed film.

First story: Robert (Jesse Plemons) is given the order by his boss/lover Raymond (Willem Dafoe) to kill a man in what should look like an accidental car crash. Despite his efforts, he can’t bring himself to do the job properly, putting his livelihood with his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) in jeopardy.

Second story: Liz (Emma Stone) returns home after being stranded on an island, but her husband Daniel (Plemons again) starts believing she’s not his real wife, even though she’s willing to be put to some gruelling tests to prove her authenticity.

Third story: Emily (Stone again) is on the hunt for a healer that can bring the dead back to life; she is specifically looking for someone who meets the exact criteria of the woman she met in a dream. She and her husband Andrew (Plemons again) are members of a cult run by Omi (Dafoe again), who is eager to discover this woman and claim legitimacy for his ‘religion’.

There isn’t much to connect each tale, as they are all linked in theme rather than story, with each a tale of a strange, and maybe perverted, kind of kindness (the only actual link between all three is the character of RMF (Yorgos Stefanakos), a side character who still has an important role in each story, particularly with how his life or death is treated by other characters—the original title of the film was going to be ‘RMF’).

The second story is somewhat the most straight-forward and logical, or it at least has the clearest concept, one akin to a Twilight Zone kind of set-up. Although its own ending is where the metaphorical ambiguity takes place, the ending of the last story is a more up-front, not to mention brutal, conclusion to the story, where the plight of Emily’s mission goes pear-shaped.

There’s enough food for thought with these three tales, especially as they work better together than as fully formed individual stories. Though a little more connectivity between them would make the film feel richer, as well as less ambiguity in the details of some of the stories, this is the kind of bizarre filmmaking and storytelling from Lanthimos, complete with very precise comedic acting and an always intriguing screenplay, that can make this film quite enthralling.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN