In the Dark Reviews

It's not often I watch a film and am left wondering whether to recommend it, but Yorgos Lanthimos' "Kinds of Kindness" fits that description.

I'm writing this review primarily because this film will appear on enough critics' choice lists that I don't want to leave prospective viewers unarmed.

Among this film's positives are its innovative format and its casting, but those threaten to be overwhelmed by its gratuitous violence and incoherent ideology.

Imagine something akin to a CBS anthology series from the 1950s and '60s, similar to "Playhouse 90" or Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," featuring an often recurring stable of character actors, playing unrelated roles each week, only animated by the dire worldview of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream."

Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone are as talented as one would expect at depicting three discrete characters, one for each vignette of this trilogy, but I was struck by the versatility of Margaret Qualley, whose work I've enjoyed in "Drive-Away Dolls," and especially Jesse Plemons, who's become a name-brand performer from "Friday Night Lights" and "Breaking Bad" through "Killers of the Flower Moon" and "Civil War."

I had been mystified by Plemons' appeal to casting directors, but I get it now. What I'd taken as a lack of expressiveness is a remarkably subtle palette of understated emotions, communicated through slight shifts of Plemons' squinty gaze and tight line of a mouth.

I wish I could be as complimentary of this film's triptych of stories. Other critics have noted that "Kinds of Kindness" showcases brutal abuses of trust, within relationships that rely on such trust to function, whether they're friends, spouses, employers and employees, or religious leaders and their followers.

This is accurate, but incomplete, because without spoiling the stories too much, their larger unifying theme is the seeming validation of unreasoning faith, which stems from each tale's O. Henry-style twist ending (again, similar to Serling's "Twilight Zone").

The degree to which these three narratives almost suggest that each victim has earned their own abusive treatment, largely just to supply suitably surprising conclusions to their respective arcs, leaves me wondering whether Lanthimos and his screenwriting partner, Efthimis Filippou, were aware of their own subtext, or if they were merely aiming to spring M. Night Shyamalan-style "gotchas" on their audiences.

On the balance, two of the three segments possess reasonable levels of internal logic for their intentionally absurd scenarios, but the middle installment launches right off the rails.

The opening plot, about a dutiful husband who's allowed his boss to dictate every detail of his personal life outside of his working hours, takes a ridiculous premise and runs with it, as Plemons manages to convey an uncomfortable authenticity in portraying a man who's been left unable to exercise any measure of independent thought.

And the concluding third act, concerning a sex cult devoted to purging themselves of what they perceive to be the outside world's toxins, was complex and compelling enough that it deserved to be its own feature-length film, as potentially merciless and unnerving in its implications as 1991's "The Rapture" or 2001's "Frailty."

Both of these episodes are capped off by morbidly hilarious punchlines that made me laugh out loud in the theater, but unfortunately, they're functionally reduced to the hamburger buns surrounding the rancid, uncooked patty of meat in the middle of this movie, about a police officer whose marine biologist wife goes missing during an expedition at sea.

This central segment benefits from the strongest opening of all three tales, which throws some rare moments of sentimentality into relief with slaps of comic vulgarity, but cinematographer Robbie Ryan's zoomed-in attention to detail becomes sickening when the narrative turns to Shakespearean-level bloodletting.

Apologies to everyone else who attended my screening, and no doubt heard me break out into a panicked, rapid-fire string of "No no NO no no" when the kitchen knife came out.

Worse yet, the "twist" at the end manages to be telegraphed and nonsensical, even on its own already arbitrary terms.

As Khan Noonien Singh said of Klingon revenge, "Kinds of Kindness" shows us that, in Lanthimos and Filippou's world, cruelty is a dish best served cold, with the severing of long-term relationships carried out clinically, with calm voices, placid smiles and the outward facades of amicable settlements.

I'll make it easy; if you don't have a stomach for explicit nudity and sexuality, close-focus visuals of gory wounds or unrelenting nihilism, this film should be a hard-pass for you.

That said, you've got a murderer's row of capable actors at the peak of their powers, two-thirds of this film kept me engaged and needing to know what would happen next, and Stone's short-lived moment of triumph really does have to be seen to be believed.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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