Kinds of Ugliness

The Greek absurdist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is a phony. But reviewers who are pledged to promoting new product are scared to use the word “phony” even when a film, such as Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, is visually, spiritually ugly and unconvincing.

In this three-part anthology, Lanthimos triples down on the unpleasantness that got him Oscar nominations and festival-circuit praise for The Favourite and Poor Things — films set outside his Greek background that yet exhibit his art-movie temerity. Lanthimos ridicules mankind’s treachery in films that, scene by scene, are not provocative, just crass.

The Kinds of Kindness short stories (“The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” running nearly three hours altogether) are named for a peripheral character (a Mediterranean outsider played by Yorgos Stefanakos) while the Western main protagonists perform various acts of sadism and humiliation — in office work, marriage, and religious pursuit. The titular idea of kindness is ironic; it’s meant to intimidate us into conceding that modern humanity is warped. But this cynicism only works for cultural gatekeepers and naïve filmgoers who have no moral foundation or sense of movie history.

Each segment sinks into depravity: First, Jesse Plemons, an obsequious employee, obeys his boss Willem Dafoe’s orders to kill. Next, Plemons plays a man who suspects his long-lost wife (Emma Stone) is impersonated by a masochistic look-alike. Then, Stone reappears as a blasphemous cult member who seeks a murderous acolyte. In these tales, Lanthimos literalizes a “theater of cruelty,” misunderstanding Antonin Artaud’s original concept in favor of fashionable nihilism. Lanthimos’s phoniness doesn’t intend to shock audiences (épater le bourgeoisie, as the French Surrealists proclaimed) but to indulge their decadence.

Gen Z recognizes its confusion in ugly movies like Poor Things, Saltburn, May December, The Power of the Dog, and The Banshees of Inisherin, but that cultural decline and moral surrender has been spreading since the unsentimental, indie-film outlawry typified during the Tarantino ’90s. Lanthimos emulates that roguishness as if bizarre or outré storytelling is funny in itself.

Kinds of Kindness is freaky but unoriginal. Lanthimos retreads the daring social perspective of Todd Solondz (Storytelling, Life During Wartime, Palindromes, Dark Horse) but lacks Solondz’s empathic wit and insight into American manners. Each Lanthimos precept uses uncommon behavior to create satire in a void — against millennial life, specifically against the way Americans live — perhaps because his home (economically impoverished Greece) doesn’t offer box-office sexiness.

Lanthimos’s kinkiness lacks sensuality, titillation, and true wit.

The first story climaxes with an attempted murder in a parking garage as if no closed-circuit cameras circumvented public behavior. The middle story’s characters mix social progressivism with pornographic desperation. The last story contrasts private psychosis and domestic abuse with everyday materialism.

So much shocking stuff becomes boring as Plemons merely imitates Philip Seymour Hoffman’s albino weirdness; Willem Dafoe repeats his mad-scientist shtick; avid Margaret Qualley does her no-limits masochist routines; and perpetually juvenile Stone goes about secret rampages in a purple Dodge Challenger — an obvious critique but not awesome like the purple Lamborghini surprise that zips by in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain.

Lanthimos lards his three-ring circus with atonal music, anomic Kubrick chorales, and oddball black-and-white interludes: weevils on palm trees, a dog hanged by its neck, and four-legged animals performing missionary-position sex — none of it as truly outrageous as the bestiality metaphors in Roman Polanski’s The Palace. Phony Lanthimos is inferior to Solondz and Polanski, who bring masterly technique and deeply felt humanism to their satires. Lanthimos’s bad-taste humor represents the ugliness of our times. Hopefully there will be fewer movies by him for a while.