Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness is three movies — and two directors — in one
What happens to auteur theory when a film director appears to be two markedly different auteurs at the same time? If you were working on a unified theory of surrealist director Yorgos Lanthimos that established a continuum between his early works in Greece, his English-language breakthroughs The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and his period Oscar contenders The Favouriteand Poor Things, get ready to scrap it. Lanthimos’ new movie, Kinds of Kindness, arriving just six months after Poor Things, is a hard left turn — or perhaps a jump into a parallel universe that establishes two distinct tracks to the director’s career.
It’s like The Favourite and Poor Things never happened. Those films’ rococo look, stylistic flamboyance, and broad, almost ribald humor is nowhere to be found. Neither is the archness and melodrama of Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, who worked on both. Instead, Kinds of Kindness stages unsettling, abstract moral fables in a starkly photographed modern world. The humor is underplayed, mordant, and pitch-black. It’s instantly recognizable as the work of that other Lanthimos, the one who made Dogtooth, The Lobster, and the darkly menacing Sacred Deer. Unsurprisingly, it reunites Lanthimos with his co-screenwriter on those films, Efthimis Filippou.
Maybe Lanthimos is aware of this bifurcation in his work: It seems like split identities are on his mind. Kinds of Kindness is actually an anthology of three shortish films, with a total run time of 164 minutes. Each of the three uses the same troupe of core actors: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie. The same faces keep coming back as different people. And within each of the three stories, characters contend with identities that have been broken in two, that they don’t seem to have control over, or that are unreliable in other ways.
In the first film, “The Death of R.M.F.,” Plemons plays Robert, a businessman who has allowed his
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