“Some of them want to abuse you / Some of them want to be abused” so opens Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest unhinged arthouse film, with the 1983 earworm “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The Eurythmics’ pounding bass beat blasts in the background, inducing a sour, throbbing headache that sets an ominous tone for the rest of the film.
Kinds of Kindness (2024) is a three-part movie with a three-hour runtime, with each story getting progressively more wild, suffocating, and strangely universal. Lanthimos doesn’t spoon-feed his viewers with exposition and specifics; the details of the film often don’t make sense when viewed one-by-one. There’s a need to look at the film from a big picture perspective to make sense of what happened, and while the details hold their weight, no Lanthimos film is ever just about the plot. The plot in his films are continuous fever dreams, where nothing really makes sense, but Lanthimos begs the question—what in this world does make sense?
To sum up Kinds of Kindness’ chaotic nature in a mere sentence, here’s what happens: A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, where every action— from the amount of food he eats the time he has sex with his wife—is decided by his boss; a cop questions his wife’s existence after her return from a supposed drowning, accusing her of being a doppelgänger; a woman goes off on a pilgrimage to search for a supposed renowned spiritual god.
Lanthimos directs like an unleashed mutt, here in full feral form. There is a diseased, nearly foul imagination here. The Greeks bring their gifts. From chopped-off thumbs, sex scenes shot in the style of a nature documentary and Dafoe’s ill-fitting Gianni Agnelli-style suits (to both his demeanor and body), this film feels like body horror. But Lanthimos always snaps the camera away before the whole situation gets too gory, instead using the violence and the strangeness to build his own brand of ferality.
This film marks Lanthimos’ fifth collaboration with screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, who notoriously brings a darker edge to his scripts. The film brilliantly features a star-studded case in this three-part epic with Jesse Plemons as the abused employee in the first act, Willem Dafoe playing a typical evil boss, and in the third act, as a cult leader wearing an orange speedo. Emma Stone can be seen as doppelgänger’s wife in the second act alongside Hunter Schafer, who makes a bold but striking appearance in a mortuary. Despite the unhinged outer packaging—there’s a simpler message to this film. Kinds of Kindness questions the lengths one would go to feel loved and accepted. In all three stories, all characters submit to the grotesque to try and win favor with whoever is important to them and the film’s sensory elements serve this inner theme. Whether that is with someone individual, like a boss, a spouse, or with a group, such as a religious cult or family. It is a desperately human thing, even in Lanthimos’ inhuman worlds, to desire to feel loved.
Past the sensory experience of the film, it’s worth thinking about the social critique that Lanthimos hides behind its monstrous facade. There is a degree of routine in all of Lanthimos’ work; people are abused by a higher institution, those who are abused eventually rebel, and either side faces a slew of consequences resulting from the rebellion. In this film, there are different kinds of kindness: the kindness that costs nothing to give to another human being, and the kindness that becomes exploited by those in power.
Lanthimos and Filippou create a truer picture of our responsibilities as individuals inside oppressive structures and their reproduction of social ills. Deeming society as uncruel is not the final conclusion for Lanthimos and Filippou. Rather, they land on cruelty as a necessary means for society to keep moving forward, despite the universal desire to be loved. Each act builds atop the last, with the film’s main themes becoming more complex as the story rages on.
In the first act, Lanthimos and Filippou critique the arbitrary societal norms that people blindly follow, because they don’t have the energy, strength, or desire to do so otherwise, through painting an everyday office-man Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons) as a lackey who cannot deny his boss’ every order. The second act, which acts as a lens into the life of a married couple, exemplifies how this condition of societal servitude creates mass levels of profound sadness, anger, or animosity towards the world. Lastly, the third act showcases how interpersonal cruelty often perpetuates itself, as the audience witnesses through the cult’s manipulation and exploitation of its members. Through these thematically converging storylines, Lanthimos and Fliippou remind us that people stuck in this system cannot transcend their fallibility as individuals and seeking to find their way in a shattered and disastrous society serves almost no one.
So, what is the point of Kinds of Kindness? Why do artists insist on making such strange things? With his films, Lanthimos is rebelling against the universal expectation that entertainment must be beautiful, pleasurable, or palatable. In The Rebel, a book-length essay exploring the nature and consequences of rebellion, philosopher Albert Camus states: “Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.” Though Lanthimos isn’t directly rebelling against the system, or even saying anything explicitly political, the work he makes asks us to recognize, in unison, how nonsensical reality is. One can step away from how unhinged the film is, to consider how weird our current reality is, then perhaps reconsider that diagnosis of insanity, whether it truly exists in the real world, imagination, or both.
Films like Kinds of Kindness exist to break the silence of the world, however silly, pointless, or plainly odd the characters or world of it may seem. Watching Kinds of Kindness is not necessarily a pleasurable experience; it is three hours of auditory and visual confusion mixed on top of over-the-top theatrical gasps from the audience. However, as philosopher Albert Camus stated in The Rebel, “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning”: here, Lanthimos is just getting started.
