A Freak Flag Flown at Half-Mast

Adam Nayman considers Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film “Kinds of Kindness” amid the provocateur director’s broader body of work.

By Adam NaymanJuly 14, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

PROMOTING HIS NEW FILM Kinds of Kindness earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, director Yorgos Lanthimos stated his admiration for Luis Buñuel: “I’m passionate about his films. […] I love that his cinema is extremely funny, I love how he escapes convention.” Such tributes are always welcome, but when it comes to an artist whose origins abut on the primal scenes of both Surrealism and cinema itself, there’s plenty of influence to go around; in truth, any provoc-auteur who’s ever tried to scandalize (or brutalize) an audience owes Buñuel a debt of gratitude, or maybe a royalty check.

For some cinephiles, Lanthimos’s 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth was the cinematic equivalent of a cover band playing the hits. Set in an isolated compound on the outskirts of Athens, the film suggested a deranged avant-garde sitcom about a sociopathic patriarch and his brainwashed, submissive brood: call it Father Knows Best (or Else). Critics were impressed by the film’s Theater of Cruelty flourishes, although there were also voices of dissent, those who deemed the film a dual riff on the claustrophobic sociology of The Exterminating Angel (1962) and the meek-shall-inherit metaphysics of Viridiana (1961), with a little bit of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sadean spectacle Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) thrown in for good measure. “Likening Dogtooth […] to the works of Luis Buñuel,” wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker, “does it no favors.”

As the buzziest Greek feature since the glory days of Costa-Gavras, Lanthimos’s film was ripe for exaltation and deconstruction; in interviews, the director staked out his distance from a national cinema whose dilapidation mirrored that of the country around it. In this context, Dogtooth was duly analyzed as a sociopolitical allegory (authoritarianism begins at home), although its real resonance was pop-cultural. Having conditioned his children to live in fear and ignorance of the outside world, the villain is undermined by surreptitiously smuggled VHS cassettes of Rocky and Jaws, which rewire the kids’ blinkered perspectives and foment an in-house revolution. (Imagine A Clockwork Orange in reverse, with the Ludovico Technique deployed to deprogram clockwork oranges.) In a movie filled with all kinds of funny-gamesmanship, the use of Sylvester Stallone and Steven Spielberg as emblems of subversive, anti-establishment samizdat was genuinely inspired, and also hilarious, a sardonic hooray for Hollywood from the cradle of the Western tradition.

Fifteen years later, Lanthimos is still crafting fables set on the fault line between nature and nurture, stories populated by scheming control freaks and their pliable playthings. What’s shocking is how much closer he is to Spielberg, at least industrially speaking. In an era when the tastemakers at major festivals have become infatuated with austere atrocity exhibitions, and self-styled sensationalists make hay by stylishly gentrifying genre tropes, Lanthimos has reached the top of the food chain: he stands unchallenged as a model transnational filmmaker, an (art-)household name who has packaged his array of alienation effects into a successful personal brand.

Since forging a partnership with the influential US distributor A24 for his 2015 English-language debut The Lobster, Lanthimos has cultivated a sweet spot between eccentricity and accessibility, sprinkling his casts with A-list actors and leaning into his reputation as a polarizing film-cultural lightning rod. He’s also crossed the Rubicon into official respectability, earning two Academy Award nominations for Best Director. Cue Buñuel, who famously claimed, on the eve of his own nomination for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), “Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than to win an Oscar.”

Buñuel’s statement of revulsion-as-principle may or may not have been reflexive (the man was not exactly averse to black-tie adulation). But it does draw a distinction between an iconoclastic artist who once attended a premiere armed with rocks to hurl at his critics and one who’s more apt to rehearse thank-you speeches. Last year’s Poor Things, which starred Emma Stone as a woman implanted with the brain of her own unborn child, was suggestive of the Dogtooth director’s domestication—a freak flag flown at half-mast. Its ratio of transgression to ingratiation was lopsided enough that it grossed over $100 million worldwide.

The party line on the 164-minute triptych Kinds of Kindness, formulated at Cannes in May, is that Lanthimos has returned to the scorched-earth sensibilities (and low-budget scrappiness) of his earlier work: a headline at Vulture declared that “sicko Yorgos is back.” In his review, critic Bilge Ebiri duly invoked Buñuel before declaring that his acolyte had reached a level of mastery worthy of its own adjective:

There is something truly … well, Lanthimosian about the fact that people dress up in tuxedos 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.

That may be, but one of the things that’s most striking about Kinds of Kindness—and which links it to Dogtooth’s airless allegory—is the extent to which it feels out of time, or between temporalities, a modern-dress production staged in an open-air amphitheater. There’s certainly something Greek about its three plotlines, which all work to invert the tradition of the deus ex machina; instead of telling stories in which divine intervention saves the day, Lanthimos and his co-scenarist Efthimis Filippou imagine a world where capricious deities, masquerading in human form, cause chaos on a whim.

Each of the three vignettes pivots on an act of sacrifice or submission, plot points involving cults of personality and car crashes. The episodes are structured as a series of self-contained but sequentially resonant echo chambers, overlapping in terms of image and ideas but intersecting via a character known only as R.M.F. (Yorgos Stefanakos), who is simultaneously incidental and indispensable to each story. This mute, woebegone figure—who is the only Greek in view—may or may not be a skeleton key to unlock a movie whose other, more famous cast members (an amazing assemblage that includes Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Margaret Qualley, and Mamoudou Athie) all play multiple roles, Qualley pulling double duty in the third installment as a pair of identical twins.

Fully synopsizing a movie as crammed with incident as Kinds of Kindness is a wearying proposition. It also diminishes the element of surprise, which is one of the things Lanthimos usually has going for him on a film-to-film basis. The comic tension in his movies arises between the best-laid plans of their contingency-minded characters and the situational curveballs that keep whizzing by their chins; the more his protagonists struggle to get a grip on their respective situations, the more swiftly control (and sanity) slips through their fingers. The disappointment of Poor Things was in how much the heroine’s putatively picaresque journey from innocence to experience—and from ignorance to enlightenment—felt like a victory lap. For all its baroque touches, the film played out as a politically correct provocation, complete with a closing tableau visually and ideologically distinct from the ending of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, released earlier that year.

Of all the themes in Lanthimos’s wheelhouse, empowerment (female or otherwise) isn’t one of them; he’s more adept at sketching descents into helplessness, as in 2017’s horror movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, about a supernaturally endowed youth who places a lethal curse on a local family (the plot is loosely based on an ancient tragedy by Euripides). Less wryly Buñuelian than coolly Kubrickian, an allusion encoded in its languorous, Shining-style tracking shots, that film traffics in existential dread while delaying (and ultimately denying) the viewer any kind of release; it’s pressurized to the point of suffocation.

The same goes for Kinds of Kindness’s first segment—“The Death of R.M.F.”—in which a prosperous white-collar executive (Plemons) fails a loyalty test to his wealthy (and apparently omnipotent) boss (Dafoe), precipitating a vertiginous personal and professional downward spiral that forces him to demagnetize his moral compass once and for all. Plemons, whose work here won him Best Actor at Cannes, mines his knack for everymannish self-effacement opposite Dafoe’s cheerfully demonic gravitas (a much better use of his talents than his sentimental Dr. Frankenstein act in Poor Things). Segment two, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” meanwhile, gives Plemons a chance to play a vintage Lanthimosian taskmaster, a lethally paranoid police officer who forces his wife (Stone) to prove her identity by committing increasingly severe acts of self-harm. It’s in this second act—somewhere in-between the accusations of body-snatching and acts of cannibalism—that Kinds of Kindness approaches the truly grueling, culminating in the mortifyingly mean-spirited segment “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” featuring Stone and Plemons as senior members of an off-the-grid religious sect trying to locate and wrangle their own private messiah, with Dafoe standing in as the Jim Jonesish puppet master.

Everybody in Kinds of Kindness is, to some extent, eager to please, and that includes its actors, whose shape-shifting virtuosity is on full display. (Plemons is truly inspired, equally convincing as a doormat and a sociopath.) On one level, the multiple roles seem like a nod to Lanthimos’s background in experimental theater, which deeply informed Dogtooth’s themes of role-playing. It also seems to imply something about the basic interchangeability of the film’s characters, whose collective flies-to-wanton-boys vulnerability is a source of twisted pathos. At this point, it’s easy (and fair) enough to equate the director’s interest in domination with his own artistic practice. In an interview with GQ, Stone opined that “the elements of control are in every thing he’s ever done”; obviously, she doesn’t mind being puppeteered, having copped an Academy Award for Poor Things. Like Buñuel and Lars von Trier (from whose stock company he raided Dafoe), Lanthimos loves his performers insofar as he can abase them. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, he had von Trier’s former plaything Nicole Kidman splay herself out naked for a pantomime of necrophilic molestation, a scenario that recurs in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” with a supine, roofied Stone swapped in her place.

The sheer proliferation of poked, prodded, and mutilated female bodies in Kinds of Kindness warrants comment, especially in the context of treating Lanthimos as an ostensible equal-opportunity offender. Whether one buys von Trier’s refrain that his movies critique misogyny instead of indulging it (or that he personally identifies with his victimized heroines), his films’ intricacy gives the director more plausible deniability than Lanthimos’s poker-faced set pieces, which glibly shove violation in our faces.

“Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped,” wrote Buñuel in his 1982 autobiography My Last Sigh, an observation that bristles with self-implicating ambivalence. Like Buñuel, Lanthimos isn’t shy about putting his fetishes on-screen, but he also countenances considerably more distance from his characters and their desires than his predecessor did. The tragic irony—and existential punch line—of Viridiana is that Silvia Pinal’s eponymous wannabe novice only thinks she’s been defiled by her husband: her impurity is a state of mind.

Time and again in Kinds of Kindness, even as he implies that defiance is a dead end, Lanthimos treats his characters’ acts of supplication with extreme skepticism. Such a contradiction ultimately speaks less to a nuanced or open-ended view of reality than to a desire to corner both sides of the argument. When the Coen brothers prodded the schlemielish hero of their metaphysical farce A Serious Man (2009) to “accept the mystery,” they were (probably unconsciously) echoing Buñuel’s dictum that “mystery is the essential element of any work of art”—an invitation to enlightenment and acceptance of the human condition. Lanthimos chases the same kind of ambiguity, but he’s more interested in dictating the terms of surrender than identifying with any feelings of cosmic agape.

The question, then, is whether Ebiri is right that Lanthimos’s movies hit a raw nerve or if, like a clumsy nurse, they’re irksome because they never tap the right vein, or truly draw blood. It’s almost impossible to imagine anybody watching Kinds of Kindness with the same deadpan implacability that went into its making: to paraphrase a considerably kinder and gentler comedy, “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl.” But it’s just as vexing to wonder what we’re supposed to take away from the experience other than a cowed respect for its maker’s willingness to put (someone’s else’s) money where his mind is. (Lanthimos is currently under the Disney distribution umbrella, whereas Buñuel financed his early films with donations from noblemen and anarchists.)

A movie like Kinds of Kindness is too confrontational—and, in its way, too accomplished—to pass unnoticed. It’s a conversation piece, not vaporous enough to be called simple exploitation and not visceral enough to be christened food for thought. As a provocation, it exists in the same synthetic, vacuum-packed universe as its characters; it’s not really pushing against anything, except maybe some abstract idea of a mainstream that needs to be reminded every so often to clutch its pearls. If that is to be Lanthimos’s role, so be it: there’s no denying his basic instinct for slapstick brutality, or that the stripped-down “sicko mode” of Kinds of Kindness suits him better than the costume balls of The Favourite (2018) or Poor Things. But it does make one wonder exactly how many times this talented, relentless filmmaker has to kick a dead horse—or kill a sacred deer—before he feels like he’s proven his point.