“Kinds of Kindness” (2024) features a notable cast, which includes Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mamoudou Athie, Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn, who is unrecognizable in each scene, but is also the least well-known actor in the group. Each depicts different characters in an anthology of three interconnected stories. Only R.M.F.  (Yorgos Stefanakos, a notary public and an old friend of Lanthimos and Filippou), plays the same, small, pivotal role in each segment. It is debatable whether the purple Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat (no relation to “Challengers,” but does belong to Emma Stone’s husband, Dave McCary, director of “Brigsby Bear”) plays the same role or is a different car in each story. The first story, “The Death of R.M.F.,” is about Robert (Plemons), who refuses to obey a command from his boss, Raymond (Dafoe), then finds himself adrift in free will. The second story, “R.M.F. is Flying,” reflects on how Daniel (Plemons again), the husband of a missing woman, Liz (Emma Stone), reacts when she returns home. The last story, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” is about Emily (also Stone), a wife and mother, who has given everything up to locate a prophesied woman and bring her back to her community. Each protagonist experiences a crisis in faith and loses conditional love, which uproots them from how they define their identity. They then feel compelled to take extreme measures to attempt a return to their comparative paradise.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film still uses actors who speak English and sets the film in California, but he returns to his inaccessible, shocking roots by reuniting with cowriter Efthimis Filippou, who worked with him in “Dogtooth” (2009), “Alps” (2011), “The Lobster” (2015) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017). If you found those films distasteful, you should probably skip this one which aims and succeeds at finding humor in the face of unflinching horrible acts. When you meet Mary/Linda, a stray dog, or Monty, a black cat in the second story, rest assured that no animal dies. Husbands, who vowed to protect and claim to love their wives, commit some brutal acts against their alleged beloveds.

Each of Plemons’ characters are devout but navigate the world of believers and non-believers with some difficulty in traversing their borders. Stone’s characters are unwavering zealots who play a supporting role in the faith journey of a larger community or at least one of Plemons’ incarnations, but their belief puts them in physical danger. Chau’s roles are women who refuse to humor any deviation from the prevailing norm of their community, would never interrogate their fundamental beliefs about the world and are prominent rejecters of any who violate the strict community guidelines and challenge the status quo. Once again, after “Poor Things” (2023), Dafoe plays an unsafe God or father figures who perceive people accurately but also can be merciless, manipulative, exploitive and judgmental in their perspicacity. Giving her mostly customary unrestrained, bold and hypersexual performance, Qualley plays women who are not at the center of the action but are close to it or have access to power. Her women seem to be free and dance to the beat of a different drummer in comparison to the other characters by defying nature and norms. Her characters have the most variety in terms of their role in each story’s narrative as true believers, outsiders or witnesses. Athie’s characters bear witness but are not true believers so they do not get swept away and remain relatively safe from the chaos around them.

“Kinds of Kindness” is an ironic title because there is not much kindness. Lanthimos and Filippou interrogate societal norms by putting them in a different context to reveal how insane and toxic they are. How many lauded stories about love or faith extol characters for their complete devotion and willingness to commit unhinged, violent acts, including murder, in the name of faith or love. To get a date, one man believes that he must injure himself to connect with another person. You know who also believes that: serial killers trying to appear helpless to lure in prey. Anything less than perfection is met with swift reprisal and rejection. Instead of responding with anger, these exiles double down and surpass their prior sacrifice and obedience in the hopes of readmittance. It is a short walk to the toxic love of “Phantom Thread” (2017). The underlying tragedy for each character is their inability to function independent of and be devoid of identity except in relation to individuals or communities. In the first segment, the protagonist does not even know what he likes to eat or drink though he is preoccupied with the idea of wanting children. Side note: why would such an empty vessel want a child?

Lanthimos and Filippou create a world where the supernatural exist on Earth, but its effect on living beings produces madness. They do not have to exaggerate much in the narrative to skewer our society’s standard of acceptable behavior in religion and love, which is trademark, dead pan, play it straight Lanthimos at his finest. If there is a drawback to this approach, it is that because he approaches most of his work with a jaundiced eye, it is hard to pull off the supernatural in a way that seems authentic and makes the audience relate to the characters, which is probably the point, but will probably leave movie lovers puzzled regarding the strange occurrences that happen within the world of “Kinds of Kindness.” Movie goers may not believe there is a supernatural world within this mythology, but there is.

Unlike “Poor Things,” scenes are shot in black and white when they are dreams or visions, which are ways that people either receive messages from God or tap into the spiritual realm. Black and white scenes also could symbolize a flash back as if it was a documentary or a security surveillance camera documenting events in a way more accurate than color, which dominates the film and injects a more emotional, subjective tone than its somber counterpart. In the first story, pay attention to dialogue during the sale of sports memorabilia. It serves as the key to the symbolism of the entire movie, and I would be grateful if anyone gets the quote, to send it my way because I only got that yellow equal youth. The film color sculpts the narrative structure in a way that leaves the viewer constantly questioning when the characters are in relation to the overall context. Viewers should not assume that the stories are told in chronological order, and indeed if one follows R.M.F.’s thread, it suggests that it does not.

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In the first segment, R.M.F. and most of the main characters obey orders from Raymond, who seems determined to kill R.M.F., and the reason for his death is revealed during the denouement. In the third segment, there is a cult looking for a woman of a specific proportion who can resurrect the dead. Emily had a dream revealing that woman’s identity, and the cult believes in purity of water. Their goal is to bring this prophesied person to a “boat,” but it is really a yacht. After becoming contaminated, Emily still pursues her mission by any means necessary, which includes drugging and kidnapping Ruth (Qualley), who raises R.M.F. from the dead, but Emily kills her in a car accident, which crashes into a boat display on the side of the highway. Emily was always an erratic driver, but there is some lingering suspicion that if she was contaminated, by further engaging in the cult’s business, she polluted Ruth. Obviously, a religion that victim blames a raped person is wrong, but according to the group’s logic, it is an explanation why the prophesy went sideways. Ruth’s death possibly means Emily and the cult’s mission statement, existence and efforts are futile and hopeless; however, R.M.F. gets to be alive, and Ruth will not be enslaved offshore. It is absurd that the only product of a miracle is some random guy who gets his shirt dirty seconds later, but the fact that he eats with gusto and no restriction and knows what he enjoys is a seed of hope. The translation of the supernatural is something absurd, innately base and quotidian yet special. Just existing becomes an act of redemption.  

While it is unclear where the second story fits chronologically, it is probably the end of the overarching story because cult members are no longer the focus, but individuals in love who are at sea without each other. In this segment, R.M.F. flies a helicopter. Let’s play with the concept of R.M.F. as at least a Lazarus figure or a Christ figure, which Ruth could be too. He is willing to sacrifice his life in the first story then rises from the dead in the third. Once he rises from the dead, in the third segment, he literally ascends to heaven and conquers death by rescuing Liz and Jonathan (Ja’Quan Monroe-Henderson) from a deserted island after her boat crashes in the water, and no one was believed to survive.

There is a cannibal tilt in the second story with Daniel (Plemons), Liz’s husband and a police officer, preferring to eat his steak practically raw. Before the accident, Liz loves lamb, a meat better cooked rare, and hates chocolate, but when she returns, she prefers chocolate. There is a brief flashback, which makes it appear that she ate her deceased three colleagues, which continues the cannibalism theme. Her taste change leads Daniel to believe that she is not his wife. Whereas the other segments lead to a literal religious exile, Daniel only gets ejected from polite society, his friends and colleagues, and his job after Daniel’s paranoia results in him shooting a person’s finger off, which puts him in a frenzy, and he licks the wound and devours the blood. He stops eating and asks his wife to cut off her thumb and feed it to him. She does so without hesitation.

As mentioned earlier, in each story, each husband does something horrific to his wife: drugs her, aborts their child, rapes her. Liz’s father, George (Dafoe), calls Daniel “a monster,” which Liz shuts down with a slap, but her refusal to heed her father’s words leads to her eventual demise as she forgives Daniel for off-screen physical abuse her and continues to mutilate herself to feed him. Lanthimos treads in the footsteps of Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” (1996) territory. While Dafoe is an actual father in this story, his characters across the board are usually correct in their assessment of a person or a situation, so his judgment of Daniel is on point. Daniel’s desire for blood and flesh is like a literal communion, which makes Liz another Christ figure, who rose from the dead, physically changed after that experience, and is willing to give her body and blood to the one that she loves. “There is no greater love than this: that a person would lay down his life for the sake of his friends.” (John 15:13). This phrase sounds less beautiful when projected on the big screen. It feels excessive and unreasonable.

There is a mysterious question left ambiguously resolved. Was Daniel right that Liz was a copy? Daniel’s belief was probably a delusion so when Liz died, there could be a couple of explanations. The lighting in the scene changes, and it could be that it is her spirit returned to him. Alternatively, he died from not eating or law enforcement discovering him with his wife’s dead body and shot him. Their spirits reunited. It is the closest that “Kinds of Kindness” comes to a traditional happy ending, a kind of heaven of reciprocated, pure love that cannot be found on Earth. It is also possible that it is the continuation of the twin theme, and there is hope that the prophesy could still be fulfilled.

Also it may be possible that Liz’s tastes were redeemed from her time on the island of dogs. Side note: Is that a reference to Wes Anderson’s movie, “Isle of Dogs” (2018), which I will never watch because I refuse to watch anything sad about animals, and it is possibly anti-cat propaganda?

“Kinds of Kindness” is Lanthimos’ longest movie. Though intellectually inventive and provocative, it does drag at times. Unlike movies like “Suspiria” (2018) or “Midsommar” (2019), which sweep fans off their feet with their imagined demented worlds with unimaginable supernatural influence, this movie is simultaneously puzzling, more predictable and staider in comparison. While one viewing is not enough, and it is a puzzle that demands to be solved, the second time around would be more enjoyable at home with subtitles and a remote to catch anything that demands a pause, rewind or fast forward.