Sicko Yorgos Is Back

Yorgos Lanthimos can now reclaim his throne as our reigning cinematic poet-king of serial humiliation. His new film Kinds of Kindness marks a return to the spectacles of personal, familial, societal degradation on which the director made his name. It’s not so much that last year’s (mostly wonderful) Oscar-winning hit Poor Things didn’t concern itself with such matters, but there, Lanthimos, working with writer Tony McNamara and adapting Alasdair Gray’s novel, found some quaint semblance of hope amid the surreal ruins. In Poor Things, a tale of exploitation and ruination became, in its final act, one of existential awakening, of empowerment and solidarity — and we could subtly sense the director losing interest, glossing over plot points and sincere emotions in a rush to get to his closing images. In Kinds of Kindness, which runs 165 minutes and consists of three distinct stories featuring the same cast in different roles, he happily takes his time, delighting and luxuriating in his roundelays of absurdism and abasement. It can be a bit exhausting — anthology films often are, and this one is long — but we can feel the director’s excitement. He’s fully back in his sandbox.

The stories in Kinds of Kindness are separate, but they’re not entirely disconnected, and they’re certainly not dissimilar. In the first, a happily married man, Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons), lives in a world where every step of his life is dictated by Raymond (Willem Dafoe), a chummy businessman who relays to Robert detailed daily instructions on what to do, what to eat, what to drink, etc. Among the tasks: He has to ram his Jeep at an appointed hour into an oncoming vehicle. After he does so, Raymond informs him that he didn’t ram the car hard enough and that he must do it again, When Robert objects that going harder could kill the other driver, Raymond seems unconcerned. So, Robert refuses. And suddenly, everything in his life starts to get taken away, including his wife (Hong Chau).

This first story is one of fallible gods treated infallibly, and in its curious cycles of control and resistance, not to mention the disaffected demeanor of its characters, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Lanthimos’s twisted 2009 family drama Dogtooth. The director’s unadorned camerawork and calm rhythms convey a sense of orderliness: This is just the way things are, the film seems to say. Doing Raymond’s bidding is the natural state of Robert’s world; when he objects, it’s as if he’s rebelling against god. (God, of course, was Dafoe’s character’s nickname in Poor Things.) And yet, this god is fundamentally an unremarkable man. (Among the gifts he’s given Robert over the years are a smashed John McEnroe racket and Ayrton Senna’s charred racing helmet. Like a proper Judeo-Christian deity, he’s a connoisseur of destruction.) The ridiculousness at the heart of the story is merely an oblique angle on the ridiculousness of real life, on the ways in which we let others control our behaviors, actions, and beliefs.

The other two stories in Kinds of Kindness turn around many of these same ideas. One follows a cop (Plemons, playing a character whose name, I’m pretty sure, is Daniel Daniels) whose marine biologist wife Liz (Emma Stone) goes missing on an expedition. When she returns, he notices that she’s changed in mundane but surprising ways — so much so that he begins to suspect she might be an imposter. The second follows two members of a bizarre cult (Plemons and Stone, again) who spend their days looking for a prophet who has the power to raise the dead; all they have to go by are a set of preposterously specific measurements. These stories all turn on an interaction with what could be the divine — whether it’s an ongoing one, a longed-for one, or a miraculous one. You could even run the stories backwards and get a more natural emotional progression, from the search for a god, to a god demonstrating their power, to the attempt to live in that god’s world.

But in Lanthimos’s cinematic universe, divinity can be a monstrous, corrupting thing. To prove that she is who she is, the once-missing wife begins doing things to herself, each stranger and crueler than the last. The cult members of the final story live a life of constant purification and needy sexual congress. Instead of water, they drink tears collected in giant tubs; their sweat is regularly tasted as a test for contamination from the outside world. Casual unkindness is built into their relationships; compassion and care are foreign concepts to them, as if they’ve all had a part of their brains removed. But then a seemingly ordinary person shows up — in the final story, it’s the Stone character’s estranged husband, played by Joe Alwyn, who wants to get back with her and wants her to spend more time with their daughter — and turns out to be more fucked up than everybody else. In other words, there’s no escape from the insanity.

I only ever see Lanthimos at festivals. Every time I see him, he’s in a suit introducing his films or accepting awards or basking in the glow of (usually well-deserved) standing ovations. It’s truly bizarre and wonderful that this Greek provocateur who makes aggressively alienating movies keeps going from major gala to major gala, accruing Oscars and hot movie star collaborators along the way. His pictures are being released by a Disney subsidiary, for crying out loud. The only other figure I can compare him to from the past is Luis Buñuel, who made surrealist movies about crazy priests and sliced eyeballs and torture fetishes and people eating shit only to wind up a part of the international jet-set, getting drinks named after him in chichi hotel bars. And I realize this is partly just the circumstances of the international festival circuit, but there is something truly…well, Lanthimosian about the fact that people dress up in tuxedoes and ball gowns to go sit in elegant theaters (as they did tonight, at Cannes) to watch this director’s characters get repeatedly humiliated and owned. But maybe that speaks to the fact that he’s hit a nerve, with pictures that evoke the comical, nonsensical, random cruelty of modern life.

Not just the cruelty, perhaps, but also the ways that we so casually go along with it. Lanthimos’s unwavering, matter-of-fact style embodies the unquestioning nature of his characters. And while the internal logic of his controlled worlds feels ironclad, it never really is. The filmmaker’s precision is a ruse, a magic trick designed to make us think one thing while quietly building a case for its opposite: the reality that none of this makes any sense. At the end of these stories, we have to face the fact that nobody really knows anything, least of all the all-powerful director, who could of course be called the Creator as well. For all his authority, god, in Kinds of Kindness, is more fallible and lost than all of us.