Name a film “Kindness” and some might expect episodes of compassion, generosity, and altruism. But call it “Kinds of Kindness,” and at the very least it induces unsettling interpretations.
The film itself doesn’t shed any real light on what is meant by this title. A logical follow up to last year’s “Poor Things,” this new film, much like its predecessor, forces us to be patient witnesses to uncommon behaviors.
Structurally, “Kinds of Kindness” is a series of three smaller films about redemption, or power dynamics, or something else. That’s up to the viewer. On the surface, they are three stories, one about a young man who struggles to reconcile his personal life with his professional one, another about someone whose wife has gone missing while on a research expedition, and the third is about woman who sacrifices everything for a cult.
But surfaces can be misleading, especially when they serve to confound typical plot lines so much that instead of revealing what’s going on, the narratives remind us that we are not always going to be told explicitly. How kind.
To further tantalize us, Lanthimos makes use of the same actors in all three, though as different characters in disjointed universes. The only similarity is that the characters find themselves in situations so indeterminate we can’t help but feel we have no choice but to gawk at them. Human emotions are indeed present as characters cry, desire, care, and stress out. But it’s almost as if we’re observing them as they move about disconnected from themselves, soulless, as if we’ve stumbled upon them while they’re dancing at a silent disco.
This takes the skills of competent actors like Stone, Plemons, Dafoe, and others to pull off. And they do, even when they appear contrived. Much in the same way that a talented singer may deliberately sing off key because of the demands of a specified role, the actors breach the boundaries of great acting so as not to appear too convincing or too real.
Finding a satisfactory definition of kindness is elusive. Maybe it’s because there’s a tendency to reward acts of normative kindness and less of a proclivity to analyze it. Attempts to scrutinize it run the risk of nudging one towards cynicism, a place where kindness is a stranger.
“Kinds of Kindness” does neither. Instead, it mumbles it, choosing to remain aloof and reveal what might bemuse us about it, just as the actors in this film must maintain detachment throughout to sustain interest.
It’s advisable that the audience does as well.
