***This post contains spoilers
Once again, I come to you, gods of cinema, and ask that since you are now giving Yorgos Lanthimos access to allll of Hollywood will you please see that these directors get to do whatever they want too:
Coralie Fargeat
Mati Diop
Babak Anvari
Julia Ducornau
Also, how about some goddamn arts funding so we can have movies made in Scotland that slap as hard as Morvern Callar?
Why has no one given Nyala Moon, director of Dilating for Maximum Results the cash she needs to make that delightful short into the feature length rom com centred on a trans woman of colour that we are all waiting for? (Okay, Moon has been selected for the 2025 Whitney Biennale and that is very cool.) I watched Bros on Netflix and it was fun but also LONG OVERDUE. WHY am I still reading Vito Russo and going ‘huh, so John Schlesinger was offering us more nuanced bisexual representation in 1966?’ And what ABOUT Gregg Araki and Rose Troche and Cheryl Dunye? They should be household names by now.
But enough of my ranting.
Kinds of Kindness is totally bizarre and I get why the trailer was basically a music video with no indication of plot. Thanks to The Substance, I can now identify Margaret Qualley simply by the shape of her calves, so I immediately knew it was her and did wonder why her character seems to exist solely in a short bathrobe for first third of the movie. The first third of the film feels like David Lynch directed a long episode of Mad Men, and I should be more up for that combination that I actually am. Part 2 concerns sinister doubles, cannibalism, and very performative group sex but as this isn’t directed by Vincenzo Natali and touched by the hand of Bryan Fuller, it’s way more like Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool. Part 3 also features the promise of group sex, but the sex is attached to a cult that involves drinking the tears of a speedo-wearing Willem Dafoe, a man who almost certainly smells like expensive patchouli.
I found myself most attentive to the middle part of this film, entitled “RMF is Flying,” perhaps because it is the one most concerned with food, cooking, and flesh. Bloody meat and chocolate cake are discussed in the same breath, part of the same meal on offer in an awkward trio, a suburban dinner where the spectre of the missing Liz (Emma Stone) hangs over proceedings. Daniel (Jesse Plemons), Martha (Qualley), and Neil (Mamoudou Athie) discuss the triumph of Liz’s roast lamb, a dish they have not eaten since she went missing at sea. Martha recalls her own unsuccessful charred salmon, and the chocolate mousse Liz was polite about, though she doesn’t like chocolate. Daniel, unhinged by grief and anxiety, seems to see Liz everywhere. After dinner, he pressures Neil and Martha into viewing the homemade pornography the four of them made together. Viewing this in a warmly lit suburban living room renders the porn both ordinary and strange, and even though the participants had consented to it at the time, Neil and Martha are both deeply uncomfortable with Daniel’s request and with the way he has become mentally unglued. In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton interviews a series of people about their relationship to that most maligned of forms, and one of them notes “People who make porn together probably have as many variegated worlds to live in as everybody else” (2023: 129) and this feels fitting to how porn and group sex seems to function in this part of the film. This is not the same as the play parties of Preaching to the Perverted, where a certain level of performativity goes alongside the authenticity of living out your fantasies. Here, the group sex these four seem to have together feels desperate, like the kind of sex you might want or have after something terrible has happened. But it also feels like the opposite of what another of Barton’s interviewees articulates, namely that pornography might open up “an exploration of untrammelled desire…what sex would be like if it wasn’t just a reciprocal exchange of orgasms. What would it be like if it wasn’t just some version of the banal question posed in women’s magazines: Are you getting enough orgasms?” (Barton 2023: 309)
When Liz is found, she tells Daniel she has missed sweets and starts eating chocolate cake straight from the fridge. Later she asks for a cigarette after dinner and suggests they all go upstairs to fuck, but the rest of them politely refuse. The next morning, she wants to fuck Daniel while he’s wearing his police uniform and he’s freaked out when she tells him that while she was missing at sea she could think only of his cock rather than hot meals or her friends and family. It this admission of unslakeable desire, coupled with her hunger for chocolate that makes Daniel believe this Liz is a doppelgänger. He begins refusing to eat what she’s cooked, and becomes suspicious of everything. Slowly, he demands more and more from her, seemingly as a kind of atonement for her absence and for her altered nature. He asks her to cut off her fingers and cook it with cauliflower. And she thinks about it, prepares it, and takes it to him in bed on a tray. He then asks for her whole leg or her liver, “because I’m feeling weak” and he finds her slumped on a chair her liver a dark red lump on the carpet. There is a kind of fairy tale quality to this particular narrative, a commonality with those stories where women’s bodies are bartered in the marketplace without their consent, and where sacrifice is often rewarded with love, marriage, or security. Even though the ‘real’ Liz returns to Daniel as soon as the double is dead, there is an eerie and unpleasant quality to this scene, as sunlight streams over the reunited lovers and the sprawled, bruised body of this unexplained presence, a person who has become a thing. Lanthimos’ work has always been dark, and people frequently gloss over the end of The Favourite, or ignore the indignities visited on so many of the characters played so wonderfully by Emma Stone in his pictures. These are real horrors, placed in absurd and strange narratives that also contain moments of humour or even eroticism. But the darkness is always lurking there, and it may be this aspect that many audiences are eager to overlook. This is why it is ridiculous to describe a film like Kinds of Kindness as quirky, since it reduces its strangeness to something digestible. I am faintly concerned that I will come across as basic if I say that Emma Stone dancing to Cobrah’s Brand New Bitch is the only moment of pleasure in this picture, and even that is disrupted by the film’s final moments of abject tragedy.
I JUST watched this!!! Soulmate shit!
Went and saw this in theaters and wanted to like it but had to walk out bc it made me feel so sick :(