We live in an absurd world, one that only seems to become more absurd by the day. And we do what we have to do to make it through each day—distractions, delusions; the human brain is resilient in coping with shit that shouldn’t, that doesn’t, make a lick of sense. Our eyes and ears take in eternal knots of information and our minds turn them into one foot in front of the other; into ham sandwiches and democracy and Avril Lavigne songs. And those realities shift from millisecond to millimeter—tilt your head one way and it’s a brand new brave new world. We are all made of waves.
And we as a culture, as humanity, seem more acutely aware of this than ever. Technology has turned us into a fractal hive mind—constant throbbing interwoven chaos. There are only so many “post”s that you can slap in front of post-post-modernism; Picasso and friends already deconstructed the human-form down to its most essential gibberish. We’ve said the phrase “every story has been told” so many times that the telling of that itself has diffused into meaninglessness. We had to invent the Matrix to make sense of the new millennium, and now here comes A.I. to finish us off. Let it tell the stories, paint the paintings, and do all of the fun stuff, all while we trek down to the Amazon factory to ship our own tubes of toothpaste back to ourselves, ad infinitum.
Anyway is it any wonder that an absurdist filmmaker like Yorgos Lanthimos, who’s sharpened the multiverse down into a shiv, has become such a phenomenon at this moment in time? I used to think it strange that the man behind wild cinematic aggressions like Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer could become the toast of Tinseltown, but no more. His films are elaborate Saw-like contraptions of rules that make no sense, of destructive behaviors that seem deeply psychotic on their face, but which his characters nevertheless adhere to, automaton-like, lest they face the wrath of whatever. A vague annihilation. And if that doesn’t nail down the international mood of our moment then I don’t know what.
His latest bout of nasty brilliance Kinds of Kindness (previously titled simply And) is a triptych of stories that have absolutely nothing and absolutely everything to do with one another. They feel on the surface connected since each one was filmed in the same soggy corners of New Orleans and each stars the same batch of actors—- first floor Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, second level Willem Dafoe and Hong Chao and Margaret Qualley, and then the third tier of mostly bit-parts rounded out by Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn and Yorgos’ non-actor friend Yorgos Stefanakos. (This film is triangles within triangles).
Stefanakos plays RMF, a wordless character who drifts through all three stories and who gives each chapter its name—“The Death of RMF,” “RMF Is Flying,” and finally, the longest chapter of the three, “RMF eats a sandwich.” (Spoiler alert: stay through the final credits and you will indeed see a sandwich be eaten, which shows you how much meaning you should ascribe to these chapter titles.) All of the other actors are playing different people in each chapter, but the repeat faces seem to ask how different are we really? Our actions are echoes of other people; we’re all ripples caught up in somebody else’s cause and effect.
Each chapter plays by, and within, its own absurd logic. Like the rewiring of language in Dogtooth or of life and death itself in The Lobster (and Kinds of Kindness notably marks Lanthimos’ return to working with screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, who wrote both of those films along with Alps and Sacred Deer… i.e. all of his meanest movies), the three worlds of Kinds of Kindness each ask us to accept one (or multiple) preposterousness within them. Doppelgangers, dog islands, you name it. How these different forms of weirdness can all co-exist in the same space matters not—Lanthimos knows we all create our own bubbles; cults of one or of many all piled in a heap. (Sometimes literally, as the orgies commence.)
In the first part, called “The Death of RMF,” Jesse Plemons plays Robert, an upper-management office man who has ceded all of his life’s decisions to his boss, Raymond (Dafoe). Every day, Robert is delivered a notecard that tells him what he will wear and eat that day or when he will have sex with his wife, Sarah (Chao). And it’s not just small daily decisions either—Raymond long ago decided that Robert and Sarah won’t be having children, and so they won’t be having any children. In return Robert has everything he could ever dream of having—a beautiful house, a beautiful wife. And yet despite all of this he still seems to be asking himself, “How did I get here?”
How far Raymond’s reach extends is the terrible question left hanging in the air across this first section—does he control every single person that Robert comes into contact with? Is he handing out hand-written notes like Phillip Seymour Hoffman did to everyone in the world within the world he created in Synecdoche New York? Is Raymond god? (Do recall that Dafoe played a not-so-mad scientist literally named “God” in Lanthimos’ Poor Things just last year.) When Raymond decides that Robert will get into a violent car accident after work one night, he tells Robert not to worry—the other driver has agreed to die, if need be.
Robert does worry, though. And he decides the moment has come to exert ye old human construct Free Will—he defiantly tells Raymond no (in a hilarious scene involving one of the most LOL-worthy reveals of bad fashion ever crafted), he will not be responsible for another man’s possible death. And he is immediately cut off. No gifts, no job, no affection. His wife disappears. Suddenly left sitting at a bar with nothing, Robert realizes he can’t even order a drink by himself anymore. Nightmares and panic overwhelms him, and before too long he will go to any length of humiliation to get back into Raymond’s graces.
And even though each chapter of Kinds of Kindness exists within its own bizarre little bubble of human behavior, each one seemingly cut off from the other, this theme recurs again and again until it becomes clear that this is the film’s guiding ethos. Peace only comes by submitting ourselves to the (outlandish, undeserving) strong men of the world. The human condition is one that desires control; of actively choosing submission. And a white-hot terror thrums at the thought of being left alone. We’ll do anything to stave that off—submit to any nonsense so long as we can feel that we belong somewhere. That we speak the same language as somebody. As long as the rules are clear and definable, no matter how insane they might look to someone standing outside, we’ll gladly submit.
In the film’s second chapter “RMF is flying” Plemons plays (notably, in this parable about power) a police officer named Daniel, one whose wife Liz (Stone) has been returned to him after an extended ship-wreck stay on a deserted island. But Daniel becomes convinced that this woman—who looks and sounds like and knows everything about their life together—is not actually his real wife. That she has been body-swapped, or replaced by aliens—he doesn’t bother to offer specifics, but he knows he is right about it. After all her shoes don’t fit! So he begins testing Liz with outrageous and grotesque and increasingly violent demands—not even to prove herself to be his wife, since he remains steadfast in his belief that she is not. But just to see how far this thing that is wearing his wife’s skin will go, all in vain to prove that she belongs.
Cults then become explicit text in the film’s third chapter “RMF eats a sandwich.” This slice puts Stone out front this time as Emily, a woman who has abandoned her husband (Joe Alwyn) and young daughter in order to live at the waterfront compound of the strange spiritual leaders Aka (Chao) and Omi (Dafoe). In between sexual liaisons with one another and the consecration of everyone’s drinking water with their tears, Aka & Omi send Emily and her suspicious sidekick Andrew (Plemons) out on road trips in search of their local messiah.
Presumably prophesied to raise the dead and I guess to rescue humanity (the specifics are left willfully vague), Emily & Andrew mainly spend their time speeding around in a purple Dodge Charger, sleeping in a seedy motel, and measuring the heights, weights, and the nipple-to-bellybutton triangulations of each of these young female possible-saviors being sent their way. But these trips off the compound keep bringing Emily into contact with her abandoned family, and so her will keeps being tested—and this is probably by Omi and Aka’s design, but I think it’s safe to say any of us would have a difficult time staying away from Joe Alwyn.
But Emily’s flirtation with outside “contaminations” inevitably leads to her downfall. And filling in its absence flows a frantic panicked hunger to regain what she has lost. Literally, her water. Her life. And, as with the other two stories, the busted body parts and broken necks that begin to pile up are a perfectly fair trade-off to reset one’s equilibrium.
To quote the song that opens the film (and is prominently featured in the film’s killer trailer), “Everybody’s looking for something… some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.” All’s fair in love and Yorgos. The dreams might be sweet, but make no mistake that they are dreams—beautiful wisps built by sheer force of blind will. We choose our destinies, and ain’t it life’s grandest pleasure to hand them over to somebody else? It is, if you will, a kind of kindness, to find someone who will chew the chaos of existence down into digestible clumps for you. Yorgos, feed me. One man’s nonsense is another one’s sweet messiah.