In the Flesh: Kinds of Kindness

“I did it,” blubbers Robert (Jesse Plemmons) as he crawls into the arms of his lover, employer, and dom, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). “I did good, I did it, I did it.” The act he’s describing, and for which he is welcomed warmly back into Raymond’s arms after finding himself rebuffed over an earlier refusal to submit, is the kidnapping and vehicular homicide of a critically injured car crash victim, R. M. F. (Lanthimos himself). Abjection, as in all Lanthimos’s work, plays a central role in Kinds of Kindness, from Robert’s mewling abasement in the face of Raymond’s disapproval to police officer Daniel’s (Plemmons again) casual cruelty to what may or may not be a doppelganger of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), and Liz’s servile acquiescence to his increasingly sadistic demands. There’s humor in it, certainly, and a bitter sadness at seeing human beings reduced to their most pitiful and naked state, but also transcendence. If we take the film’s language as our own, then that total submission of the self is a gift. Desperate, toxic, and often venal, to be sure, but a gift nonetheless. Like Daniel as he wallows in self-pity while watching a video of group sex with his missing wife and their friends, we are seeing something profoundly intimate because others have chosen to share it with us.

Each of the three films that make up Kinds of Kindness acts as a prism through which to view the others, with each part further complicating Lanthimos’s themes of abjection, sexual experimentation, food, and interpersonal power. Passivity becomes malice, desire becomes nausea, love becomes entitlement. There’s more than a little of the fairy tale woven into these films, an arbitrary cosmic cruelty and a nasty sense of poetic justice both alternately at play. Who is Robert but the archetypal suitor seeking to win his bride’s (Raymond’s) hand by performing ever more impossible and bizarre acts? Who is Daniel but the perceptive trickster whose keen attention to his wife’s body and nature leads him to coerce and abuse her doppelganger into killing itself, triggering the immediate and unexplained return of his true and loving wife? In the sex cult central to the third short, cult leader Aka (Hong Chau) tests the “purity” of her and co-leader Omi’s (Dafoe) lovers by licking the salt from their navels after forcing them to endure an excruciatingly hot sauna, an act of political mummery reminiscent of Hansel with his fingerbone or the blinded Polyphemus groping at his sheep in search of Odysseus and his men. 

There is a tremendous sense of depth to the shot compositions Lanthimos uses here, stretched and distorted by his signature use of the fisheye lens. One particular shot in which Daniel walks along the edge of an indoor swimming pool of splashing, shouting children is at once heart-stoppingly beautiful and strangely alien. It’s clear these concepts have extensive interplay for Lanthimos, whose evident respect and love for both natural and manmade beauty drives him to distort the symmetrical, to deform the exquisite, to lodge us in corners and bow our perceptions until nothing is quite right and anything that gets too close to perfection strikes us as uncanny. He makes particularly good use of Stone in this light, exploiting her gift for repulsive expressions with subtle tricks of lighting and angle until she’s like one of the leering priests in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. His attention to detail extends to the film’s unimpeachable costuming, from the oversized suit and cropped hair that make Andrew (Plemmons) look like L. Ron Hubbard after a bout with leukemia to the suburban cop’s-wife kitsch of Liz’s evening wear.

And the sex! My God. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the electric thrill of seeing Stone shove her hooked fingers uninvited into Anna’s (Hunter Schaefer) mouth, or the skin-crawling revulsion as it dawned on me what Emily’s estranged husband was trying to do to her. There’s the delicious shock of seeing Susan’s (Krystal Alayne Chambers) fat body framed as beautiful, an object of desire, and the sensual pleasure of Dafoe’s ravaged features and harsh, croaking voice as he commands and punishes his lovers. There’s the excitement of watching Stone degrade herself outside the cult’s compound gates, her childlike attempts to kiss Aka through the bars, her long-limbed body suddenly artless and gangling. Her dance in the wake of her discovery is another pure joy, sensual and ridiculous, alive with adolescent hunger for approval and certainty of reward. There is so much in this film, such a beautiful depth and color to it. Without hesitation, it is among the year’s best.