Yorgo Lanthimos a Greek Film Director further cements his strong reputation of being one of the best directors that the contemporary world has by his ninth feature film, Kinds Of Kindness. This is a triptych piece due to type of humor, shocking violence and sexual context attached with it. A blend of all the works of Lanthimos is such. This third piece of Lanthimos is perhaps the most minimalistic due to a lack of decoration, Victorian décor shaped like steam punk Alasdair Gray adaptation. The core setting is different from what New Orleans usually possesses, a French quarter, in that it possesses what one may call mundane office buildings accompanied by suburban household and roads. As with all of Lanthimos’s, Nikki Amuka Bird’s character is not the stereo type.
In this opening scene, Robert, portrayed by Jesse Plemons, is constrained by his enigmatic manager Raymond, played by Willem Dafoe, in a manner that makes him look devoid of any choices. Having previously crashed his car into a van on Raymond’s orders, Robert now finds himself in a foreign location and is told to do the same but refuses, and soon he is expelled. All of Raymond’s odd sports memorabilia had Robert’s name written over it, such as Robert’s shattered John McEnroe tennis racquet, is taken from his house, and his spouse Sarah Chau Hong abandons him. Robert comes across Rita Stone in his despair and finally he succumbs to Raymond’s pressure. The first part of the segment, which is titled ‘The Death Of R.M.F’ gave Jesse Plemons more of a lead performance than usual as he was able to showcase a variety of emotions during the scene. This also sets up the background for what is about to follow seamlessly.
While it is true that Lanthimos’ best work remains at the fringes of consciousness, at least he appears to be finally making a breach into the commonality of cinema.
With each segment, each member of the ensemble takes on a new performance with the exception of Yorgos Stefanakos, a frequent collaborator of Lanthimos, who stars in each segment as R. It’s an abbreviation of the word Regional Manager. He has only a peripheral role in the stories but features in all of them. The Dark states that the trilogy shares a common plot. The Necrophiliac’s storyline intertwines with surreal, deadpan dark humor, tries to abide by the silence and sets a slower pace for the viewer. Such elements were already present in other films by Lanthimos Dogtooth and The Lobster. The rating is grossly understated and does not deliver the shock one dwells for in this film.
Stone, who was largely absent in the opening sequence, surfaces strongly when she has to play Liz, the wife of Plemons’ Daniel (and daughter to Dafoe’s George) in part two. This woman is a marine biologist who has been missing for several years and she spends an inordinate amount of time on a deserted island chewing on a human leg and from the black and white flashbacks that we are shown it is in the later stages of this claim that things get interesting after Daniel starts to view ‘Liz’ as someone who appears too much like an actress. As with most anthology films, this part of the movie is probably the weakest even though there’s still a lot that is worthy of watching. The rest of the cast, including Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie as the friends of Liz and Daniel who are mildly sympathetic, continue to shine in these roles. There is one sequence in this scene that must be particularly devastating and it’s actually pretty hilarious for an unforthcoming film and quite graphic too, but only for a bit (if anything else, it will certainly irritate those who criticize films for their sex scenes.)
Eventually, Dafoe shows up again as Omi, the cult leader, in the last section for which he deserves the part, perhaps because he is one of the most fearsome and fascinating actors in Hollywood, and Plemons and Stone play a married couple hoping to find a woman who has the ability to revive the dead woman.
A devilish sequence involving Stone and a dog is further complimented by macabre happenings in a morgue which is among the highlights of the concluding segment.
As I said before, the title is rather ironic, for I am joining Yorgos Lanthimos and his film once again in which he assembles a rough, beautiful folk who interchange their so called furiousness towards each other. Whether this is his greatest work is debatable since the film is indeed profound yet it sits at a whopping 165 minutes making it also a tiny bit overlong. But it is good to know that he gets to make such strange, colossal films with movie stars like Stone, who once again goes all out in her portrayal. The conflict of interest between them is still dominating in this piece: he still fervently tries to make “strange things”, but the mainstream audience turned out to be his own. But of course Yorgos himself is at center of it and we can only smile.
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