USA. 2024.
Crew
Director – Yorgos Lanthimos, Screenplay – Efthimis Filippou & Yorgos Lanthimos, Producers – Ed Guiney, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Lowe & Kaisa Malipan, Photography – Robbie Ryan, Music – Jerskin Fendrix, Visual Effects – Automatik VFX (Supervisor – Sebastian Barker), Special Effects Supervisor – Matt Kutcher, Production Design – Anthony Gasparro. Production Company – Element Pictures.
Cast
The Death of R.M.F.:- Jesse Plemons (Robert Fletcher), Willem Dafoe (Raymond), Emma Stone (Rita Fanning), Hong Chau (Sarah Fletcher), Margaret Qualley (Vivian), Mamoudou Athie (Will), Kencil Mejia (Chaval Barman), Joe Alwyn (Collectibles Appraiser), Yorgos Stefanakos (R.M.F.). R.M.F. is Flying:- Jesse Plemons (Daniel), Emma Stone (Liz), Mamoudou Athie (Neil), Margaret Qualley (Martha), Willem Dafoe (George), Hong Chau (Sharon), Nathan Mulligan (Dr Evans), Lawrence Johnson (Police Chief). R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich:- Emma Stone (Emily), Jesse Plemons (Andrew), Margaret Qualley (Rebecca King/Ruth King), Joe Alwyn (Joseph), Hong Chau (Aka), Willem Dafoe (Omi), Mamoudou Athie (Morgue Nurse), Hunter Schaefer (Anna), Merah Benoit (Emily’s Daughter)
Plot
The Death of R.M.F.:- Robert Fletcher lives a life where he follows every instruction given by his boss Raymond, from his choice of wife to their not having any children to the weight he maintains to his night-time reading choice of Anna Karenina. Raymond now orders that Robert engage in an accident with a selected vehicle and be taken to hospital. When the first attempt only ends with a minor scratch, Raymond orders that Robert do so again but drive with more force. Robert protests against this, knowing that he might kill the other driver. Immediately after refusing, Robert’s life starts to fall apart – his wife leaves him, he cannot get another job and Raymond refuses to accept his apology. R.M.F. is Flying:- Police officer Daniel’s wife Liz has been missing at sea. He then receives news that she has been found alive. After she is returned home from the hospital, Daniel becomes certain that Liz has changed and is someone different. His state of mind has him suspended from the force. At home, he refuses to eat. R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich:- Emily and Andrew are members of a cult who are searching for one of a pair of twins who has the ability to resurrect the dead. The search has so far been fruitless. While out in their search, Emily visits her ex-husband but he drugs her drink and has sex with her. This results in Emily being deemed unclean by the rest of the cult and banished. She determines to find the twin they are looking for.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has become a critical favourite in the last few years. Lanthimos first gained attention with his second film Dogtooth (2009), a bizarre deadpan comedy concerning parents that have kept their children imprisoned at home their whole lives with the children only imagining the outside world. Lanthimos went on to make Attenberg (2010) and Alps (2011), which met mixed receptions, but had another hit with his first English-language outing The Lobster (2015), a bizarre film set in a future where people are required to be in relationships at threat of being transformed into animals if they do not meet their partner.
Lanthimos subsequently began to move in more mainstream directions with The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) in which Barry Keoghan places a curse on Colin Farrell’s family and in particular the historical film The Favourite (2018), his first pairing with Emma Stone, which saw Lanthimos nominated for an Academy Award Best Director, and Poor Things (2023), a revisionist take on the Frankenstein story that again had Lanthimos nominated for an Academy Award with Emma Stone winning.
Lanthimos’s most recent films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things, have seen him leaving behind the pitch black deadpan of earlier films such as Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster for more straightforward and less oblique storytelling. However, Kinds of Kindness reveals Lanthimos back at his old tricks. The film is an Anthology of three stories, each of which features the same actors – Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn – in different roles.
The first episode The Death of R.M.F. is the best realised of the stories. It is Yorgos Lanthimos back in black deadpan and the only of the segments that gets the tone perfect without a missed note throughout the entire story. The episode is essentially Jesse Plemons following every requirement that boss Willem Dafoe demands of his life, which as the episode reveals has consisted of everything from a set-up to woo the woman he should marry to feeding her drugs to ensure that she aborts any children, when he can have sex to his bedtime reading material, his weight, the type of drink he can order in a bar and then that he should get into an accident that may fatally kill the other person (who has of course agreed to this outcome). The blackness of the episode is also in seeing Jesse’s life fall apart as he comes clean to wife Hong Chau, his attempts to get another job and, most hilariously, his faltering attempts to find another woman by using the same tactic of pretending an injury in the hallway of the bar.
The Death of R.M.F. is incidentally the only episode that mentions the significance of R.M.F. after which each of the episodes is titled – it is the initials emblazoned on the shirt of the man (Yorgos Stefanakos) that Margaret Qualley interviews for the position of the other driver in the opening scene. The same man (and possibly the same character) turns up in the third episode as the person who is resurrected and then reappears during the mid-credits eating at the outdoor table of a fast food restaurant where he spills ketchup over the R.M.F. insignia. Both Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone have characters with the initials R.F. in The Death of R.M.F., although whether that is of significance is unclear. Also, while each of the episodes has a title that involves R.M.F. involved in some action, this bears no relevance to anything that happens in any of episodes.
R.M.F. is Flying is a more mixed episode that takes its time to find that really black note. It only reaches that point during the latter third of the episode where Jesse Plemons reaches the conclusion that Emma Stone is not herself and then makes requests that she serve him up her body parts for food, which she keeps obligingly doing. In the end, the piece becomes a strange Doppelganger or Body Snatchers piece – it is not exactly clear what. The strangest part of the episode is when Emma Stone recounts to Willem Dafoe the dream she had while she was stranded at sea of a world where dogs rule. In the end coda, we see a montage of scenes from such a world in black-and-white, filled with dogs eating plates of pasta, driving cars, showering, having sex in a bed, even hanging themselves.
The third episode R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich is also a mixed episode. It concerns the deadpan activities of a group – a cult who are obsessed with purification rituals and seem to enjoy interchangeable sexual relationships with each other – and their search for a twin who has the powers of resurrection. This all occurs with an oblique deadpan where you are not quite sure where it is going. That is right up until the end where it hits that black pitch as we see the banished Emma Stone engaged in abduction and then the blacker-than-black finale of the episode just as the credits come up.
(Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Jesse Plemmons) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
Trailer here