Movie Review: 'Kinds of Kindness' SPOILER REVIEW

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou

Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau

Release Date June 21st, 2024

Published July 5th, 2024

Kinds of Kindness is a confounding bit of absurdity. An anthology starring a recurring group of actors, led by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, Kinds of Kindness invites you to decide what it all means while presenting a series of seemingly non-sequitur bits of dark comedy, irony, and mild horror. All of the stories, in some way, involve a silent, stoic man known only as R.M.F whose death, attempted murder, and ambiguous fate occur as important aspects of each oddball story.

I am trying to help myself understand just what Kinds of Kindness is all about so this review is filled with spoilers. I need to map this out if I am going to try to understand exactly what it is I saw in Kinds of Kindness. Did I like this movie? Do I have a theory of what it is about? Is the movie simply so absurd that it defies any kind of explanation? I hope that by providing a beginning to end description of these three stories something will emerge as a theme, idea, or theory. Here goes nothing.

The first story in Kinds of Kindness is called The Death of R.M.F and it finds Jesse Plemons playing Robert, a spineless man whose fetish is having his entire life dictated to him. Every decision in Robert's life is made by someone else. That someone else is his boss-guru, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). The most recent task assigned to Robert is a car accident in which a man known as R.M.F is to be struck. Robert is to ram R.M.F's vehicle and get himself sent to the hospital. It doesn't work, Robert simply doesn't hit the other car hard enough.

Robert explains to Raymond that he doesn't want to hit R.M.F's car too hard because he doesn't want to kill him. When Raymond explains that this is part of the deal, R.M.F has agreed to die, Robert still says no. This causes Raymond to fire Robert, leaving Robert unmoored. Desperate to get back into Raymond's good graces, and get someone to tell him what to do again, Robert bombards Raymond with a newfound willingness to kill R.M.F. After his wife, Sarah (Hong Chau) leaves him, Robert eventually latches onto Rita (Emma Stone).

Rita, it seems, is the new Robert. She is now being controlled by Raymond who makes all of her decisions for her. Robert grows jealous of her and when she also fails to kill R.M.F in a car accident, Robert takes the opportunity of R.M.F being hospitalized to drag the man's already near dead body down to the parking lot where Robert drives over him repeatedly, killing him. This brings Robert back into Raymond's good graces and Robert ends the story back where he started, being loved and cared for by Raymond and Raymond's live in lover, Vivian (Margaret Qualley).

In the second story, titled R.M.F is Flying, Jesse Plemons stars as a Police Officer named Daniel who comes to believe that his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), is not the real Liz. Liz was recently nearly killed in a boat accident. She ended up trapped on an island for several days where she may or may not have turned to cannibalism to survive. Upon her return, she's different. Before, she didn't like chocolate. Now she eats an entire chocolate cake. Her favorite outfit is no longer her favorite outfit, and, most damningly, her shoes no longer fit.

In order to prove that Liz is not really Liz, Daniel asks her to cut off her finger, cook it, and serve it to him. She does this and he still doesn't believe her. While doing his job, Daniel assaults a man, shooting him in the hand and then tries to lick the blood off of the stump of this man's mangled hand. And, in the final act of this bizarre story, Daniel demands that Liz cook and serve him her own liver. Liz dies after extricating her own liver but just as this is revealed, there is a knock at the door and the real Liz is there and the story ends.

The final story of Kinds of Kindness is called R.M.F Eats a Sandwich. The story centers on a cult led by Omi (Willem Dafoe) and Aka (Hong Chau). They are searching for some kind of savior figure and they have tasked Emily (Emma Stone) and Andrew (Jesse Plemons) with finding the savior. The information that they have is that the savior is a woman. She's a twin sister. And one of the twins is dead. Early in the story we see a savior candidate, played by Hunter Schafer, who attempts to bring a man back to life. It doesn't work and thus, she's not the savior.

Emily meanwhile, finds herself drawn back to her old life where her husband Joseph is raising their young daughter. Emily visits regularly to drop off gifts that Joseph passes off as being from him. On a recent occasion, Emily is caught sneaking out of her former home and her daughter begs her to come back for dinner. A few days later, she does return but she's too late to see the daughter. Joseph then proceeds to drug and sexually assault Emily. This leaves Emily polluted by the standards of the cult and she is kicked out.

Needing a way back into the cult, Emily seeks out a strange woman named Ruth (Margaret Qualley) who believes that her sister is the savior that the cult is searching for. The only problem is that Ruth is alive but she plans to solve that problem. Ruth will end her life thus making her sister, Rebecca, also played by Qualley, a perfect candidate to be the savior. How Ruth dies mirrors a story she tells, rather randomly, about how she nearly died by diving into an empty pool, only to be rescued by her sister.

With Ruth dead, Emily approaches Rebecca. She kidnaps the young veterinarian and brings her to the morgue. On the slab is R.M.F. After getting Rebecca to lay her hands on the deceased man, R.M.F rises from death and looks at Emily. He's been resurrected and Emily has found the savior she's been looking for. After a brief dance break, Emily hops back into her beloved Dodge Charger and speeds off. An accident occurs that kills Rebecca and Emily is left to live with having killed her savior. The End. During the credits, a resurrected R.M.F eats a sandwich thus justifying the title of this short.

It's... a lot. So what does it all mean? I'm still not sure. Themes of fetishistic, slavish, devotion appear throughout. Perhaps Lanthimos is trying to say something about the willingness of so many people to surrender their decisions to others. In The Death of R.M.F both Robert and Rita surrender their entire existence to one man. They do the same in R.M.F Eats a Sandwich where Emily and Andrew are members of a literal cult that they are desperate to remain part of. And, in R.M.F is Flying, the supposedly fake Liz is so devoted to proving herself to Daniel that she kills herself.

As I was writing that last paragraph, something kind of unlocked. What if Kinds of Kindness is about cinema itself? What if in each of the shorts, Lanthimos is exploring the idea of actors devoting themselves to the vision of a director? The ways in which actors are so vulnerable and devoted to directors is similar to the ways that Robert was devoted to Raymond, that Rita was devoted to Daniel, and how Emily was devoted to the cult. Perhaps Kinds of Kindness is exploring the dynamic of director and actor. That's the best I have come up with so far.

It's also notable that the acting in Kinds of Kindness is top notch. Jesse Plemons is doing some of the best work of his very unique career in Kinds of Kindness. Though he recedes to the background in R.M.F Eats a Sandwich, he's extraordinary in both R.M.F Must Die and R.M.F is Flying where he drives both plots with his bizarre energy and determination. Emma Stone is also quite good both supporting Plemons' performances and in taking the oddball lead in R.M.F Eats a Sandwich. Actors surrendering themselves to the strange vision of their director can pay off with some terrific work.

But, what about R.M.F? Who is R.M.F in this metaphor regarding the dynamic of actor and director? In the first short, he's willing to let himself be killed for the sake of the story being told. R.M.F is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, a notary public in Athens, Greece, who happens to be a longtime friend of director Yorgos Lanthimos and writer Efthimis Filippou. According to the director, the character of R.M.F means whatever you want him to mean. I taking him as a stand in for the screenwriter, that ever battered soul who has to sit back and watch as a director takes their vision and crushes it into a new context, gives it a new meaning, and, if they are kind resurrects that original vision in a better form by the time the movie is finished and on the screen.

What screenwriter can't relate to having been crushed during the making of the movie only to find the final product preserved and enhanced their initial vision. Sure, you're vision had to die in the process, but, in the best case scenario, your vision is resurrected into something you're still proud to have your name on. What is Kinds of Kindness but a directors tribute to screenwriting, acting, and directing, a tribute to the various people who have to come together, above the line on a movie, and mold, cut, shape, and fold the movie into something that can sell tickets to audiences. You might say, there are different ways to be kind to the people you collaborate with people while making movies. Ways in which you direct your actors to their best performances and ways in which you rebuild a screenplay into a final form reminiscent of the original vision but now built into a shared vision. These kinds of kindness make up the movie, Kinds of Kindness.

Find my archive of more than 20 years and more than 2000 movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Find my modern review archive on my Vocal Profile, linked here. Follow me on Twitter at PodcastSean. Follow the archive blog on Twitter at SeanattheMovies. Listen to me talk about movies on the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast. If you have enjoyed what you have read, consider subscribing to my writing on Vocal. If you'd like to support my writing, you can do so by making a monthly pledge or by leaving a one time tip. Thanks!