Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kinds of Kindness’ on Hulu, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Tryptich of Weirdness, Starring Emma Stone

Naught but a handful of months have passed since the the last Yorgos Lanthimos feature – Poor Things, which put an Oscar on Emma Stone’s shelf – and already we get Kinds of Kindness (now streaming on Hulu, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a self-described “triptych fable” clocking in at nearly three hours. As the description implies, the film consists of three shorts, with Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau and Margaret Qualley tackling roles in all of them. Notably, Lanthimos returns to his writing desk for Kindness, after directing others’ scripts for previous awards-season stalwarts The Favourite and Poor Things, and it finds him returning to the deep weirdness of his earlier filmography (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer). And to call it A Bit Much is a bit of an understatement.

KINDS OF KINDNESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: First short: The Death of R.M.F. Robert (Plemons) has a job, but who knows exactly what it is. His boss Raymond (Dafoe) micromanages the guy down to his haircut, body weight and sex life – and the reproductive viability of Robert’s wife (Chau). Raymond wants Robert to purposely kill a man known only as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos) by causing a car accident, but who knows exactly why. Robert so very much wants to please his boss – yes, who knows exactly why, but he sure seems insecure, and possibly brainwashed – but when he fails to essentially commit murder for the domineering weirdo, he gets fired. And replaced, it seems, by Rita (Stone), who Robert promptly begins stalking, in a mostly gentle manner, although it involves self-inflicted bodily harm. Where the hell is all this going? Who knows, exactly.

Second short: R.M.F. is Flying. Daniel (Plemons) is in quite a state. You would be too, if your wife was missing at sea. Liz (Stone) is a marine biologist and something happened and nobody knows if she’s alive or what. Daniel asks his best buddy and police partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and his wife Liz (Qualley) over for dinner and Daniel wants them to watch an old video with him and they say it’d be too awkward but he cries and they relent and WAIT’LL YOU SEE THE VIDEO. But then, whaddayaknow, Liz arrives, very much alive, on an aeromed copter. It seems she was marooned on a desert island like the protagonist of a New Yorker cartoon. She seems OK and comes home but Robert doesn’t believe it’s really her. I mean, he asked her to play his favorite song, so she played ‘Rainbow in the Dark’ by Dio, and even though he really likes that song, it’s not his favorite. Do we believe him? The evidence is rather compelling!

Third short: R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons) are in the morgue. Do they come here often? Indeed they do – they’re trying to find a woman who can reanimate the dead. And this woman here today, she ain’t it. It seems that Emily and Andrew have been given this task by Omi (Dafoe), a sex-cult leader who looks like he has Tilda Swinton’s stylist on retainer. The cult demands that its followers drink water infused with the tears of Omi and Aka (Chau), and to only have sex with Omi, and to sweat out their sins in an excessively broiling sauna – and possibly to dictate that Emily and Andrew wear terrible and ill-fitting clothing, because I absolutely cannot decipher Andrew’s billowy khaki’s-and-sandals ensemble. They meet Ruth (Qualley), who says her twin sister may be the woman they’re looking for. Meanwhile, Emily has yet to trim loose threads from what appears to be her former life, i.e., her daughter and husband (Joe Alwyn). Will any of this be resolved in a non-disturbing way? Doubtful!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The last time an auteur followed up two acclaimed sort-of-arthouse hits with an unruly three-hour chunk of surrealist disturbo-comedy, it was Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid.

Performance Worth Watching: Plemons remains the only marrow-chiller in Hollywood who can convey deeply disturbed and disarmingly innocent with a single expression, as he does in the first two shorts here.

Memorable Dialogue: Daniel thinks he knows how to spot the imposters among us: “Their feet are different. Their feet are bigger and softer for some reason.”

Sex and Skin: Some quick male and female frontal, toplessness, and a glimpse at an orgy-adjacent scenario – just like your home video from Granny’s birthday party.

Our Take: Considering Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” is the greatest musical composition in the history of human civilization, one might be led to believe that Liz only improved as a person while apparently being forced into cannibalism on that island. The former needle drop and latter cutaway shot are prime examples of Kinds of Kindness’ pitch-black, occasionally uproarious comedy, which keeps the film from being too heavy of a slog through the gloomy, acrid alleyways of the human soul. Lanthimos has always courted that darkness (the profoundly upsetting Sacred Deer nearly drowned us in the inky blackness), so we’ve come to expect such dalliances with nihilism in his films – and this feels almost like a correction after he concluded the very weird, very wild Poor Things on a hopeful note.

Although all three chapters of Kinds of Kindness – the title is ironic, if you haven’t figured it out by now – share cast members and an absurdist-horrific tone, it’s debatable whether they function as a cohesive whole. Writing with frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos fiddles with ideas (control, delusion, submissiveness) and motifs (doppelgangers, food, sexual extremity) but the anthology nature of the film renders it more of a strong-scoring hand of darts where none of the bolts hit the bullseye. 

I preferred Sandwich for being the most upsetting and funniest of the three shorts, for its balance of extremes and a thoughtful performance from Stone. Death functions best as a barely veiled allegory for cog-in-the-machine corporate fealty, while Flying shocks with its gruesome imagery – and Plemons holds these two chapters together with his unsettling-as-ever presence. Altogether, Kindness is more of an exercise in provocation than a focused missive, Lanthimos withholds and teases key information to maintain suspense, and employs exaggeration (grotesque violence, sex and manipulation) to mask realistic, relatable scenarios that trade in common fears such as loss or the struggle to find a greater purpose. He tends to leave characters’ motives opaque and capitalizes on our curiosity, sometimes testing our patience, sometimes compelling us to puzzle out meaning from all the dream-logic weirdness – if there’s any meaning to be had.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lanthimos is a singular filmmaker. No argument there. Kinds of Kindness isn’t among his best, and it occasionally feels calculated to be weird and obtuse. But leaning forward and squinting at the screen (and occasionally squirming) in an attempt to decipher what you’re seeing? Well, at least the film inspires active viewing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.