Arriving less than a year after Poor Things, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Dogtooth screenwriter Efthymis Filippou for Kinds of Kindness, a triptych about the interplay of consumption, power, fate, and faith. The idea that all your dreams feature the same set of characters feels true to this film, with Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mamoudou Athie, Hong Chau, and Hunter Schafer rotating in the cast, committed to delivering the quirky Lanthimosian dryness that defines their mosaic performances.
Kinds of Kindness arrives on the heels of Lanthimos’ Poor Things, and leaves subtle nods to the director’s cinematic past. It references the animal world, a vague allusion to 2015’s The Lobster, and explores themes of contorted bodies, medicinal fate, free will, and hospital beds, reminiscent of 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Though he departed from his classic dark style for 2018’s The Favourite — a more large-scale production that felt more cohesive and less experimental — he didn’t abandon his hunger for the bizarre for long.
Between its islands of dogs and clinical halls, Kinds of Kindness is fundamentally a film about the absurdity of the human condition. Though dubbed as “surreal,” Kinds of Kindness, and Lanthimos’ films at large, borrow more from the genre of magical realism than from the surreal. Indulging in dream-like logic, discomfort, and metaphor, Kinds of Kindness is dependent on an uneasiness that translates everyday experiences or tropes into something strange.
Magical realism, unlike surrealism, retains an element of the real — which some argue is even more surreal and strange. Lanthimos doesn’t propel us into a made-up world; he shows us what in the world is real — and what in that realness is deeply strange, from the absurdity of eating, desire, death, and human interaction at large. Genius borders on psychosis; the world of the real becomes deeply fantastical, and even then, dinner is still served — whether as a toe or a plate of fried eggs.
Food heavily features throughout the film, reflecting the characters’ obsessions with weight loss or gain, a suspicious liking for chocolate cake, and the frying up of limbs. It is as though what we consume will eventually consume us — much like the characters in Lanthimos’ strange world, who are often destroyed by their own desires and perversions. Dafoe begs Plemons to gain weight, saying, “Skinny men are the most ridiculous thing there is,” while Schafer and Qualley’s breasts and bodies are weighed on silver scales like meat. Food becomes another vessel through which Lanthimos’ characters transpose desire, excess, and abstinence. In the final triptych, Stone’s character is willing to cut off her limbs for food to prove that she is a real woman. In this, Lanthimos, perhaps unconsciously, represents the plight of womanhood — existing in a world where food and the female body are conflated.
The human drive to dominate and the absence of free will are not new themes in Lanthimos’ films. The recycling of these tropes is arguably a fervent way to reinstate them, as we try to make sense of Lanthimos’ almost three-hour creation. What does it all mean? “You know Daniel,” a character muses, to which another answers, “he can take forever to decide.” Maybe this is true of Lanthimos too. Does Lanthimos know what it all means? It seems almost impossible to make complete sense of Lanthimos’ characters, and perhaps this is not the point. Rather, one must see which characters make sense to them.
Stone notes, “One of the most exciting things about these stories is that people find it reflects what’s going on within them,” and there is a myriad of tropes, quirks, and fantasies that viewers can choose to resonate with or discard. Surrealist Andre Breton has noted the importance of cinema’s ‘pouvoir de dépaysement’ — its capacity to take man out of himself. The interest in cinema comes from a desire to transcend everyday reality by viewing everyday reality as inherently surreal, which Kinds of Kindness offers.
In the final triptych, Stone’s character recalls a dream where she is stuck in a swimming pool, only to be saved by a synchronised swimmer who breaks from her routine. This is precisely how Lanthimos’ films function: we find something, or someone, stuck at the bottom of our swimming pool, and to free it, we must break from our routine, or as Breton puts it, “take ourselves out of ourselves.” Lanthimos’ dreamlike worlds pull us to the bottom of our own swimming pools and break us from the monotony of everyday life, allowing us to see life for what it is: grotesque, jarring, and deeply absurd.