Have you ever felt a heavy anxiety that sinks deep into your chest when you experience something you feel like you were never supposed to see? Art can often be a beautiful, cathartic thing to drink in. Many forms of art can spark positive, uplifting feelings inside your mind. Kinds of Kindness is not that kind of art. Kinds of Kindness explores the unsynchronized harmony of different forms of love, sex, connection, and control. There isn’t an inch of Kinds of Kindness that doesn’t feel completely lubricated in dissonance. The cinematography, performances, sound, and even lighting bring an uneasy feeling that pushes you to really examine what you are being presented with.
Kinds of Kindness is an anthology directed by Yorgos Lanthimos that contains three stories interconnected by a set of initials. The first story follows a man who accepts love in exchange for freedom of choice. The second deals with a return and how sometimes there is no way back from coming out of sync with the world around you. The final story grasps for a place of belonging. Each is cruel, sexually charged, and beautiful in a way many other stories cannot begin to capture.
There is no easy way to wrap a bow around writing about this film. It’s a set of stories that make you feel like you shouldn’t be seeing what unravels in front of you. The characters created by writers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou are deeply flawed as we all are. Each of the main characters we follow across the three stories is yearning for something. Each story is deeply human without the veneer of a false hope for a happy ending. It is a reminder that sometimes things don’t work out. There is so much power in breaking away from the harmony of happiness that can flood most stories. Nothing about any of these characters or their connections ever feels right. There is always something two steps from being a fruitful about every connection we see between them. There is no choir of angels singing about love or a saviour truly in this film. It is uniquely heartbreakingly beautiful to watch every step in the three stories that begs you to tear the flesh back from your eyes so you don’t have to see the horror about to splatter across the screen. It pushes the ideas of kindness into the uncanny valley. You may see someone holding someone else as if the feelings for them are so pure but below that, you know there is something sinister.
Each of the actors in the film takes up different roles in the three stories of Kinds of Kindness. The cast is filled with some of the greatest actors of our time with names like Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, and the god-like Emma Stone. Each of these three takes up very different but similar roles in each of the stories that feel an octave away from one another. Emma Stone has this way of delivering lines in part 3 that feels almost inhuman at times. When she is speaking, it’s almost as if the record is skipping and it just makes you focus tighter on every word that leaves her mouth.
There is something deeply unsettling about every performance in many ways. That statement cannot be stapled to just their performances but to everything that goes into the film. In some scenes, it is the clothes they are wearing that just make your skin crawl. For example, for almost all of the first story Margaret Qualley is wearing a silk robe every time we see her. Normally, something so sultry could be used to really show the beauty of the actress. But we know that her partner is controlling the lives of everyone around him so her lack of normal clothing while at home feels deliberate. It’s the removal of a freedom on another level. Controlling an item that is often correlated with passion to exchange it’s meaning with more of an object like a collar is quite off kilter from our own expectations.
Each shot of the film is unsettling after examination. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography for the film rests heavily on angles and wide shots that don’t really line up with what I expect to see in films. There are some shots where we don’t even see one of the actors faces at all as they have a discussion. It’s a brilliant way to convey that maybe this person isn’t who they seem or you aren’t supposed to be seeing this conversation. Each frame screams to be torn apart thematically to help digest what is being portrayed in each scene.
Nothing about any angle in Kinds of Kindness feels unintentional but it never feels with the grain. There are low-angled POV shots of Jesse Plemons that are some of the most unflattering angles that a human can be filmed at that push a level of discomfort under your flesh that will have you writhing in your seat. It is truly awe-inspiring to watch as things unfold because everything feels off in a way that you cannot look away.
There is a level of attention to lighting that feels unparalleled in film. Light, thematically, is a source of truth in every situation. We use light to banish darkness on our journey for universal truths. But in Kinds of Kindness, it is often used to split faces with shadows and light. There are times in the film where it is used to make a character look pathetic comparatively to another who may have a fully lit face. It is something about the film that will need further examination once the film is available to be watched at home. There are so many scenes that beg to be frozen to be broken down to make things feel okay. But Kinds of Kindness wants this from you. It wants you to take the time to sit with the disconnect of the art in front of you and maybe the world around you.
Everything in Kinds of Kindness is stitched together expertly by the score from Jerskin Fendriz. This is where the dissonance is driven with full force. Dissonance itself is the lack of harmony amongst musical notes but the film uses dissonance to show the lack of it in human connection and so much more. But all of that relies on the heavy thematic lifting of dissonance that the films piano heavy score focuses in on.
In music, there is something called “The Devil’s Interval” which is a tritone. The film itself feels like a tritone of art. Without delving too deeply into music theory, most music relies on perfect intervals which are stable. But dissonance is the uneasy sound that comes with the tritone. The reason it’s called The Devil’s Interval goes back to Gregorian chants when music was dominated by the church. Tritones were banned in some cases from being used because perfect tones were a praise to god. Jerskin uses the power of the tritone in the score to drive that feeling of dissonance in every scene it is featured in. It works almost like John William’s Jaws theme in some cases which also has a lot of two chords that are similar to the tritone. There are scenes where a character is about to do something horrific where the score bubbles up like the Jaws theme does when the shark is ready to attack.
The use of the score in that way almost satirizes a film technique called Micky Mousing which is where the music follows a character on screen in sync. Fendrix used the dissonance of the tritone to show us that something is coming along with a Gregorian chant that he wrote for the film. The music makes everything on screen more unsettling as it follows the characters to whatever action they are about to make. These tones and unsettling sounds follow the characters through each story with breaks in the score to feature songs like “Rainbow in the Dark” by Dio. Those sudden shifts in sound only drive the themes further effortlessly.
Kinds of Kindness is a film uninterested in creating worlds where we see harmony. Dissonance is king for everything that went into creating this anthology. Every piece of the puzzle is jagged and broken so nothing fits just right. It is meant to make your skin crawl because as humans, we do not want to face uncomforted in the ways the film shows. Each person yearns to be loved but we do not want to be confronted by the cost of it or the simple truth, that sometimes there is something inhumane behind the smile of someone we want acceptance from.