Before any images come to the screen, we hear a beat. It’s the pounding, hypnotic opening chords of The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), but it soon becomes very clear that Kinds Of Kindness is not about sweet dreams at all. Nor is it about any kind of kindness we might recognise. In the world of director Yorgos Lanthimos, everyone is living their own darkly twisted nightmare. 

Lanthimos’s latest film, which comes straight off the back of his Oscar darling Poor Things, is structured in three seemingly unrelated stories. His cast, led by Poor Things lead Emma Stone, assumes new roles in each vignette. The only apparent connecting factor is the character R. M. F., who reappears in each story. “We didn’t want to have a main character reappearing, but a character that had a short time in the film. But at the same time, his presence was pivotal,” said Lanthimos at the New York premiere.

The first story, The Death of R. M. F., sees Jesse Plemons playing a businessman whose life is minutely controlled by his God-like boss (Willem Defoe). This boss tells him what to wear, what to eat, who to marry and when to sleep. When he refuses a particularly dark order, his boss finds a new protege in the form of Emma Stone. It’s a surreal little tale about control and free will and toxic relationships in the modern capitalist world.

In the second story, R. M. F. is Flying, Plemons plays a haunted cop whose wife, Stone again, has been lost at sea during a marine biology expedition. Upon her return, he becomes convinced that she is an imposter. He challenges her with a series gory tasks.

The third story, R. M. F. Eats a Sandwich, follows Stone and Plemons as partners working to find a woman with the supernatural power of resurrection at the behest of their cult leader. When Stone’s character finds herself pulled back into the lives of her husband, played by Joe Alwyn, and their daughter, her position in the cult is threatened. 

There is little to connect these stories, but an overarching theme is certainly the manic search for a guiding force in a world that doesn’t seem to have a very good explanation for anything. 

Leaving the cinema after the film feels a lot like waking from a fitful night’s sleep, bizarre, barely-linked visions still swimming just behind your eyes. The way each actor so ingeniously shape-shifts into new characters only adds to the effect. I felt my brain itching to piece everything I had just witnessed together; to find some sort of thread of meaning. But the lack of cohesion is, I think, intentional. Like a fever dream, you wake from these visions feeling a little disturbed, a little haunted, a little off-balance. We never learn the full name of R. M. F. (royal mind f***, perhaps?), but I can’t help but wonder if the entire, twisted saga is, in some way, a peek inside his own nightmares.

Interestingly, each disconnected tale actually hinges around a dream, which plays out in black and white on the screen. In each tale, these visions initially seem beyond the realm of possibility — too dark, too fantastical to become a reality. However, Lanthimos merges the real world and the dream world throughout his triptych and by the end of each tale, the characters’s horrific visions seem to spill into reality.

Lanthimos is a master of creating strange, uncanny worlds. Before the manic, steampunk-ified Poor Things, he brought us a twisted version of 18th century England with The Favourite and off-putting, surrealism with The Lobster. Things are never quite right in the world of Lanthimos. And his cast, effortlessly slipping into their new skins, seem perfectly at home in this weird world.

This marks Stone’s third collaboration with Lanthimos after The Favourite and Poor Things. (She also appeared in a 2022 short from the director called Bleat.) She brings a distinctly powerful eeriness to each of her three characters here. There’s something strange going on behind her eyes; something we can’t quite understand and, perhaps, don’t really want to. It’s mesmerising and just a little dangerous. Plemons is also remarkable in his three roles, bringing real humanity and empathy to the first two in particular. Alwyn has tiny roles in the first two vignettes, but as Stone’s creepy, sad husband in the third, he offers a sinister intensity that matches the danger of Stone’s performance. Margaret Qualley is also suitably odd as the boss’s dutiful young partner in the first story and as a pair of twins in the third. It’s easy to see why Lanthimos has gathered this group of returning actors around him. They all get it. They’re all along for whatever strange ride he wants to take them on. Whether the rest of us can stomach it is another matter.

Images: Searchlight Pictures