At the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I saw Yorgos Lanthimos' 2024 film, Kinds of Kindness, co-written by Lathimos and Efthimis Filippou, starring an ensemble cast of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamodou Athie, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn. The film is an anthology film, in the style of absurdist black comedy, with three loosely connected stories, with the cast playing different roles in each story. An ongoing theme is of a character searching for something, to either feel a sense of belonging, being validated, or finding connection.
In the first segment, "The Death of R.M.F.," Robert Fletcher (Plemons) works for his controlling boss Raymond (Dafoe), who controls his life in a seemingly BDSM master and servant kind of way, where Robert follows all of Raymond's orders in his personal life, including having his wife Sarah (Chau) set up for him, his house and car paid by his boss, and reporting all his daily activities, including his meals and sex with his wife, to his boss. When Raymond orders him to intentionally crash his car into another man's car to murder him, the titular R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), Robert does it, but the other man survives. When Robert refuses to do it again, Raymond fires him, cuts off all contact with him, and takes his wife (and the present he gave them, a broken tennis racket destroyed by John McEnroe in 1984) away from him. Robert is distraught without a master to follow, repeatedly begging Raymond to serve him again. When he meets Rita (Stone) by chance, he has an opportunity to get back into Raymond's good graces again.
This story was interesting, and unfolded well, in which Plemons as Robert comes off as desperate and pathetic when he keeps hounding Raymond, wanting to feel validated in serving him and having a rich man dictate his entire life to him, not having a sense of identity outside that role to Raymond. It started the film off strong, with the characters all speaking in this didactic way to each other, very matter of fact with very little slang or colloquiums.
The second story, titled "R.M.F. is Flying," features Plemons as Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz (Stone) has just turned up after having gone missing after a work expedition trip. He is thrilled to have her back, but he noticed things about her that don't seem like the Liz he knew, and worries that she may be an imposter who just looks and sounds like his wife. He doesn't remember what his favorite song is (where he tells his best friend that it's Madonna's "Holiday," but in a jump cut in the car she played Dio's "Rainbow in the Dark"), she is more sexually forward, and has more of a craving for chocolate. Daniel is trying to convince his best friends (Athie, Qualley), who are skeptical, and he also thinks her co-worker, who survived but is dying with an infected leg, may be an imposter too.
I liked this story, where it got more into paranoia and suspicion and speculative fiction, and it stood out in an intriguing way, especially with Stone's performance in playing it very deadpan. It was likely my favorite of the segments.
The third and final story, titled "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich," is about two cult members, Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons), who are looking for a woman with the power of necromancy, the ability to bring the dead back to life. They serve their cult, and try with one woman (Schafer), but aren't successful, and Emily talks about how she had a dream where she was trapped in the bottom of a pool with her hair stuck in the filter, and two nearly identical synchronized swimmers came into the pool, and one rescued her and cut her hair, and Emily is convinced that the woman exists in real life, with her twin deceased. A waitress (Qualley) gives them information to find her twin, a veterinarian, who may have the gift. Emily is also secretly visiting her ex-husband and her daughter, which the cult likely has forbidden outside contact with family members.
With the rest happens in the story, I didn't like it as much. For content warning, there is a sexual assault that happens that I felt was really unnecessary in the story, and felt awful watching it. The film will show thin young women topless, but depicts a heavyset woman in her underwear in a light that felt unflattering. For a film that wants to seem weird and offbeat, it still stuck by Hollywood standards of wanting to show thin, conventionally attractive young women nearly nude, and it did feel a little gratuitous. Nudity in movies doesn't bother me much, but in this film it just felt like putting it in just for the sake of seeing Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, and Hunter Schafer nearly naked because they are thin and beautiful.
One of the last sequences in that story is when Emily does a happy celebratory dance, to Cobrah's "Brand New Bitch," and the backstory to that is fun: during the making of Lanthimos' Poor Things, Emma Stone was goofing around with a friend, and started dancing to the song while in costume for her character Bella Baxter, doing jerky dance moves to a club song, and it's really fun to watch the contrast of her in her fantasy period costume doing modern dance moves, so it's a cool little moment in the movie that has already gone viral online.
I was happy to see Mamodou Athie get more attention. I've liked him since the Netflix movie Unicorn Store with Brie Larson, and the short-lived Netflix series Archive 81, and he voiced one of the lead characters in Elemental, so I'm happy to see more of him, he has this intriguing quiet calm to him that makes him compelling to watch onscreen.
Hong Chau was Oscar-nominated for her role in The Whale, and received critical acclaim for her performances in Downsizing, Inherent Vice, the TV show Treme, and The Menu. She has this character actor, realistic persona to her acting that made her feel more like a real person outside of the lead characters, and I found her engaging to watch.
So in all, I was mixed on the movie, liking some aspects and the dark humor, but feeling like the third story really brought the movie down, especially for a nearly three-hour movie, as the last segment felt like it ran too long. I don't like it as much as Lanthimos' previous movies, but I still think it's decent and to watch as an offbeat film with Hollywood stars in it.
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