Kinds of Kindness

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Surrealist maestro Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things,” “Dogtooth”) can be depended on for daring themes and images. Like Jean-Luc Godard, he should be well applauded in this age of franchises and Blockbuster banquets, but his stories are not easy on the eyes. He is dependably upsetting. In “Kinds of Kindness,” a sardonic title, Lanthimos again does not disappoint.

Robert (Jesse Plemons) is a generic worker subservient to an egocentric CEO type (Willem Dafoe). Every aspect of his life is planned from his wardrobe, romantic relationship, lifestyle, and diet.

When he crashes his sports-car, the CEO demands that he crash again to kill a man. Robert is horrified to the point of humiliation and can’t do it.

The CEO disowns him and throws him essentially into poverty. Robert is instantly destroyed having no self-esteem. To humiliate himself further, he purposely breaks his foot.

Robert gains a bit of sympathy from a self-absorbed and rich Rita (Emma Stone).

Robert is stuck in limbo with Rita and driven to madness by his exile by the CEO. Robert resolves to run over the man he was ordered to kill, once the man is ejected from his wheelchair.

Robert runs over him twice and one can hear the bones crunch.

In the next story, the actor Jesse Plemons is now a policeman with a wife (Emma Stone) who has been missing for years at sea. The policeman has weekly dinners with friends in which he watches graphic pornography, featuring his wife involved in threesomes.

One day his wife is rescued, yet the glum officer is convinced that his wife is an imposter.

The cop goes on a starvation diet, only to suddenly relent and order his wife to serve her organs.

The last story involves a paranormal seeking couple obsessed with finding a lady who can resurrect the dead. They are bound to a cult headed by Dafoe who is narcissistic and elitist.

The stories share an interchangeable quality regarding blood, meat, cooking and cannibalism. The dialogue is stilted and spacey. All of the stories feature Plemons being dominated in a Kafkaesque fashion with Dafoe playing the master.

This film no doubt has a lot to say about being dominated and oppressed without any possible leverage or hope for betterment, though the role of this film feels uncertain, beyond a surrealist expression of events.

The acting is first rate with both Plemons and Stone in particular pushing herself to uncomfortable and gory limits.

There are black comic touches very much like dreams: the reckless driving of Emma Stone, impromptu and without reason and the abrupt request for a human finger.

As an amoral dream of ego, desire, and degradation it works and one is carried along by the melancholy and mania, held in the somnambulism of the strange and gory imagery. Narratively, however, the voltage dissipates, and one can feel overrun by the objectively handled gore and murder.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com