Kinds of Cruelty would be a more accurate title for Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest movie, but in line with the director’s often skewed view of human foibles and how those foibles can be dramatized, he frames his uniformly unpleasant characters in ways that accentuate their well-meaningness while at the same time exposing their basest impulses. In that context it’s worth repeating what a number of other critics have pointed out about Lanthimos’s approach. Here, working with Efthimis Filippou, the screenwriter who did his earlier Greek-language work as well as his more outré English-language movies, Lanthimos misses the common narrative appeal of his two best movies, the Oscar winners The Favourite and Poor Things, which were written by someone else. Like Dogtooth and The Lobster, Kinds of Kindness relies on twisted personalities doing weird things that Lanthimos obviously believes will be intriguing to his audience but which are just baffling because they are set in a very familiar, almost banal world (in this case urban and suburban America). Lanthimos is the master of the startling non sequitur, and Kinds of Kindness, at almost three hours, is just one long series of non sequiturs in service to clearly delineated plots that could have just as easily been conceived in a more naturalistic way without losing any of their thematic relevance, for what that’s worth.

There are three distinct stories using the same group of actors playing different characters, the only through-line being an amorphous, mute participant who goes by the initials R.M.F. This character figures into the titles of all three stories, though only in the first does his presence have any meaning. In that story, “The Death of R.M.F.,” he seems to be hired by a powerful CEO named Raymond (Willem Dafoe) to act as the “victim” of an employee, Robert (Jesse Plemons), whom Raymond has cultivated at every step of his adult development. Raymond has bought Robert the nice house he lives in, chosen his wife, Sarah (Hong Chau), tells him when to have sex and what to eat, and generally dictates every detail of his life. When he asks him to purposely get into an car crash with R.M.F. and the result is a fender bender with no serious casualties, Raymond is disappointed and demands Robert do it again with more seriousness and Robert refuses, occasioning a rift between mentor and mentee that leads to terrible, albeit ridiculous outcomes. There are lots of ways to interpret this tale, though none of them have anything to do with how we live our lives realistically. It’s all designed to shock and dismay. In the second story, “R.M.F. is Flying,” Plemons plays Daniel, a police officer whose oceanographer wife, Liz (Emma Stone), has gone missing during a field survey at sea. After she is finally found alive, Daniel’s anxiety does not turn to joy but rather paranoia, as he is convinced Liz is not the woman he married but some kind of imposter. As in the first story, matters become increasingly ludicrous as they also turn violent and distressing. The last, and probably best story, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” has Plemons and Stone playing acolytes of a new age guru (Dafoe) and his partner (Chau) looking for a chosen individual who has the ability to raise the dead. Stone’s character is a woman who has abandoned her husband and daughter for the guru and is eventually compromised in the guru’s estimation with regard to her faith, and then summarily banished; at which point she endeavors to return to the fold by any means necessary. More pointless violence ensues.

As already suggested, much of this violence, which includes vehicular mayhem, shootings, self-mutilation, and a particularly disturbing rape, is played at least partially for laughs, and while Lanthimos has a certain talent for the transgressive effect, it’s so schematically presented that you feel he’s following some kind of manual. Almost all the decor is sterile and tasteful, the dialogue invariably high-mindedly polite except when it isn’t (thus provoking a predictable reaction), and the story details single-mindedly counter-intuitive. For instance, I couldn’t figure out why Lanthimos and Filippou had Stone’s character in the last story drive a vintage Dodge Charger at exceedingly high speeds, since it didn’t seem to match the character’s sensibility, and the reason only became clear in the last scene, when her reckless driving caps the action in the most blatantly obvious way. It felt like cheating, and then I realized that the whole movie was kind of a scam. 

Opens Sept. 27 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Kinds of Kindness home page in Japanese

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