Kinds of Kindness Review: Meet the Feel-Bad Movie of the Summer

“Directors who have massive success early on in their career and get a series of “blank checks” to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baybee!”

Anyone who has listened to the popular film podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, hosted by actor Griffin Newman and The Atlantic critic David Sims, will recognize those words that open every episode. In an age of IP-driven, heavily studio-controlled films, the days of blank-check filmmakers have had an even more difficult time getting those passion projects off the ground. It seemed like even when a director makes a big box office hit; they have trouble spinning that off into non-franchise work.

2024 has been an interesting time for directors cashing in blank checks. Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, a director whose work on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now should earn him a blank check for life, had to write his own check to fund Megalopolis, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to applause and boos from the first screening. The film has since landed a distributor from Lionsgate, and it will be interesting to see the reaction to the film. Meanwhile, George Miller’s Furosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to the Academy Award-nominated Mad Max: Fury Road, received rave reviews from critics but was a box office bomb.

With those checks bounced, thankfully, Yorgos Lanthimos‘s latest film, Kinds of Kindness, cleared in a big way in terms of artistic achievement. It is excellent, and while it might not be as overtly audacious as the director’s previous film, Poor Things, the film is just as good, with the closest point of comparison being Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. It’s a sprawling epic that features an epic cast that includes Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn.

The Key Players

Lanthimos is both the director and co-writer of Kinds of Kindness, reunited with Efthimis Filippou as the duo previously wrote Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer together. Kinds of Kindness is an anthology film that features the same group of actors playing different roles in each segment. The first segment, “The Death of R.M.F,” focuses on a man (Jesse Plemons) breaking away from the boss (Willem Dafoe), who controls every aspect of his life and tries to find a sense of purpose in a world without rules.

The second segment, “R.M.F. is Flying,” sees a man (Plemons) become suspicious after his wife (Emma Stone) returns from being missing and believing she is an imposter. The final segment, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” follows a cult group as they seek to find a unique individual who can resurrect the dead, while one of the members (Stone) finds herself at a crossroads with her place in the group.

Each Story Builds on the Last

With each segment featuring actors playing different roles in each story, there are thematic connections that unite the three stories, from simple ones, like a recurring emphasis on food, liquids, and nourishment, to how certain actors fill similar roles in the story, like how Dafoe is an authoritative figure or how Stone and Plemons are often opposite one another in some manner. Actors like Chau, Athie, Qualley, and Alwyn’s roles are often more fluid in each segment. There are larger ones, like how each story revolves around an institution like employment, marriage, or religion, which all force a person to put themselves at the mercy of another. This is just the surface of the symbolism and themes Lanthimos is exploring.

Casting the same actor in multiple roles also becomes textual, as various stories in the movie emphasize duplicates. The entire second story revolves around a husband’s fear that the woman claiming to be his wife is an imposter, while the third story sees the cult’s clue of who their person with the ability to resurrect the dead being someone with a dead twin.

Featuring the same actor in a different role for each segment not only is a great showcase for them to embody vastly different personalities marked only by a few minor changes in facial hair or hair styling but also can’t help but draw a parallel to how these stories cross over one another but never meet. At times, it can seem like you are viewing the same person had their life gone a different way. It calls to mind the Shakespeare line from As You Like It:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Yet all these stories do exist somewhat intertwining, emphasizing the motif of duality and duplicates. All three stories are tied together by the appearance of the character R.M.F., the only character played by the same actor. R.M.F. is never a prominent character; he barely registers in each story, often a glorified cameo. He is an individual who is at the mercy of these other people’s stories, with the shocking reality being that none of these characters indeed are in control of their own story and are equally minor in the schemes of others’ stories.

Deep and Layered Symbolism

Anthology films are tricky as, at times, they can often find a difficult time finding a common throughline to connect the various short stories. Lanthimos builds on each story in fascinating ways as patterns begin to form. While Stone and Plemons’s characters are often paired together, the balance between the two shifts as the film goes on. In the first segment, “The Death of R.M.F.,” Stone doesn’t appear until the end of the story, with Plemons being the main focus. The second story, “R.M.F. is Flying,” sees the two almost share equal screen time, while the final segment, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” has Stone take the stage front and center, and Plemons leaves the story mid-way through.

In addition, with each segment, physical contact and sex intensify with each entry. Where the first segment makes a pointed remark about how the boss controls when someone has sex, and the final segment features a cult leader having open conversations about how he has sex with every member. This sense of escalation in themes and actors’ roles in the film gives each segment a sense of momentum. This also keeps the film’s large runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes (24 minutes longer than Poor Things) from ever feeling too daunting.

Building each story on top of one another in this particular structure also keeps the viewer guessing. Within ten minutes of each story, the viewer is given an idea of what each story is about (an extreme examination of people letting their work control their lives, growing apart from a spouse, and the demands of a cult on an individual), but then stories often swerve in drastically different directions than what seemed telegraphed early on, leaving each story about so much more.

Unlike Alex Garland’s recent Civil War, which kept things so vague it made for a rather hollow viewing experience that managed to say nothing, Kinds of Kindness packs so much symbolism and meaning that each story can be interpreted in a number of ways with multiple complimenting and competing messages for viewers that will lead to plenty of great discussions afterward.

Focusing on Displeasure

Kinds of Kindness is a triumph for director Yorgos Lanthimos. Following Poor Things seemed like a difficult task, with its hand-crafted vibrant sets and costumes and Academy Award-winning performance by Emma Stone in a Frankenstein reimaging that was the right kind of oft-kilter for an audience who has been tired of a sameness from both mainstream blockbuster cinema and also conventional awards offerings.

Kinds of Kindness might not have the same crossover appeal (although Emma Stone’s dance moves are just as jaw-droppingly excellent). Still, it is an incredible showcase of all the actors involved as they inhabit a wide variety of characters just as Lanthimos does as a director. Despite a more grounded aesthetic, the film still offers the same dreamlike absurdist visuals as Lanthimos’s previous films.

It also is much more gruesome and disturbing, with scenes of bodily harm that will certainly leave some viewers squirming and uncomfortable. Where Poor Things pushed boundaries in terms of displaying pleasure, Kinds of Kindness is more about displeasure and pain. In 2011, Sony Pictures marketed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the “feel-bad movie of the holiday season,” and Kinds of Kindness could certainly be called the feel-bad movie of the summer movie season in the best way possible.

Kinds of Kindness opens in theaters on June 21, 2024.