There are two fantastic needle drops that bookend Yorgos Lanthimos's new anthology film Kinds of Kindness.
The first is 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)', Eurythmics' instantly recognisable 80s paean to pain and pleasure. The second could be its contemporary companion piece: 'Brand New Bitch', a lascivious, dead-eyed number from the Swedish artist COBRAH, who, over a squelching bassline, dons dominatrix cosplay to extol the virtues of submission.
For Lanthimos, both tracks are an intrusion, blasted at ear-splitting volume as if rousing us from the film's otherwise somnambulant torpor. They ignite the screen as much as they would a dancefloor.
Taken together, the songs also supply an organising principle for an often formless film. Their lyrics convey a porousness between desire and debauchery. To lust after another, they suggest, is to debase oneself – a theme that also eddies, elusively, beneath Kinds of Kindness without ever reaching the clarity heralded by its soundtrack.
The abstraction is frustrating, though it is certainly intentional. Following two consecutive awards darlings – the Oscar-winning Poor Things and The Favourite – Kinds of Kindness marks Lanthimos's return to the deadpan excursions into cruelty and despair for which he first made his name.
There's more than a trace here of Dogtooth – the Greek director's 2009 breakout about a couple who exercise sadistic powers to shield their adult children from the world outside – as well as 2017's The Killing of a Sacred Deer, an astringent character study of a father forced to sacrifice one of his own kin.
Kinds of Kindness mirrors the unvarnished cynicism of these earlier works with a triptych of separate, sinister narratives — all featuring the same ensemble, led by Jesse Plemons and Lanthimos regular Emma Stone.
In the opening segment, Plemons plays a gawky salaryman, Robert, who has ceded all command of his life to his employer Raymond (Willem Dafoe, who also stars in Poor Things). Robert's existence is preordained via daily instructions on what to eat, wear, read, drink. Both his wife (Hong Chau) and their tastefully anonymous quarters are products of Raymond's whims.
When Robert bungles a homicidal mission, however, things sour – and he soon finds himself replaced by a plucky upstart (Emma Stone).
The second instalment is all the more perverse. Plemons and Stone are now husband and wife: He is a beat cop named Daniel and she is Liz, a marine researcher recently rescued after going missing on a risky expedition.
Their happy reunion is marred by almost imperceptible changes that are enough to trigger suspicions that she's been replaced by an imposter: Her feet are suddenly too big for her shoes; she can't remember her beloved's favourite song; and her face often seems locked in a lobotomised smile, even at the sight of the food she once abhorred most.
Beneath the flashy absurdity and spasmodic humour, there is a bracing hostility in both of these tales. The latter concludes in a bloody demise as Daniel's paranoia reaches a grisly apex.
Like any of Lanthimos's earlier joints, Kinds of Kindness surveys the failures of humanity and magnifies them into a universe of unsparingly bleak logic, where barbarity is banal and characters routinely degrade each other for sport.
Here, though, the pessimism is so unrelenting that it threatens to become rote. Lanthimos immures his actors – game as they are – within various tableaus of control and subjugation that struggle to hold true meaning on closer inspection.
This is, no doubt, Lanthimos's objective: to reject anything as facile as moral interpretation. It is a tongue-in-cheek experiment at taking Hollywood's most lauded stars and plonking them in some of mainstream cinema's most alienating material. But, at 164 minutes long, Kinds of Kindness begins to feel like its own act of sadism.
At least its last act offers a glimpse of redemption.
It is the zippiest, most propulsive of the bunch: a sun-drenched jaunt brimming with religious theatrics courtesy of Dafoe and Hong Chau as a pair of cult leaders who purify drinking water with their tears and reward their followers with fornication.
Among their adherents are a pair (Plemons and Stone, again) desperately trying to locate a mystical healer based on a ludicrously precise set of body measurements.
Their odyssey, of course, is pure lunacy. No man – or dog – is spared in their quest for divine absolution. And yet, for all its brutality, you can sense a lightness in Lanthimos's outlook, as if he has finally expunged his deepest troubles to make room for fresh woes.
At last, the film's world-weary sigh becomes a wink – even if only briefly.
Kinds of Kindness is in cinemas now.
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2024-07-10 23:39:58Z
CBMia2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDI0LTA3LTExL2tpbmRzLW9mLWtpbmRuZXNzLXJldmlldy1tb3ZpZS15b3Jnb3MtbGFudGhpbW9zLWVtbWEtc3RvbmUvMTA0MDgxMjcw0gEoaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEwNDA4MTI3MA
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