Shoot the pianist: "Kinds of Kindness"

After the creative and commercial renewals of last summer, the movies are reverting to recent type: everything much of a muchness, nothing new at the multiplex, scant attempt to reach out to those who've been sent fleeing over the past decade in the direction of the couch. Granted, in the instance of Inside Out 2, the audience would seem (disproportionately?) thrilled to be getting more of the same, though there "the same" equates to Pixar on something close to their old form. I'd be surprised if that enthusiasm transfers across to Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos's second release in six months, which is More of the Same (Indie Edition). After the success of The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos has apparently reached the point where he can get quick and easy financing for even his bottom-drawer ideas: here, a tripytch of loosely linked shorts rotating the same core cast (Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau) in a notional variety of roles. It is at once an old touring-company trick, a gimmick, and an obvious marketing boon. Much as Wes Anderson realised a heavyweight A-list ensemble might help defend his films against charges of childish tweeness, Lanthimos has learnt that the right performers can mitigate against the angular weirdness the mass audience has traditionally found alienating. Weirdness is what we're getting here again: unlike Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2021 compendium Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, where each tale revealed something new about the filmmaker and his worldview, Kinds finds Lanthimos ploughing on regardless, recycling blank-faced actors, flatly delivered absurdist dialogue and the spare piano stabs that signify Something's Afoot. If you enjoy this sort of mannerism, as you may have done in The Favourite and Poor Things, you'll likely like this. If you don't, then you won't. What Kinds of Kindness ultimately suggests is that even what we used to classify as arthouse cinema has fallen subject to algorithmic thinking. Here, from the Yorgos Lanthimos Cinematic Universe, are three more tales of the utterly expected.

Their combined total of 163 minutes - count 'em - at least offer ample time to study the methodology and pathology at play within this universe, and to wonder at length whether this filmmaker is anything more than a tic developed by an enfeebled artform. If the movies now struggle to make the elevating four-quadrant crowdpleasers that once came as standard, why shouldn't they default to simply giving the malcontents among us what they want to see? (The crisis in the cinema has the same root cause as the crisis in our politics: an absence of any bettering or sustaining vision.) The Lanthimos methodology is where these films are at their simplest, reliably pushing human behaviour to a (generally unlovely, often brutal) extreme. So it is that in Kinds' solid enough opener, "The Death of R.M.F.", Plemons plays not just a corporate lackey but a sap whose entire existence falls under the control of his boss (Dafoe), down to the time he eats, sleeps and makes love to his wife. In the second story, "R.M.F. Takes a Flight", which makes a laborious chore of a Rod Serling-like set-up, Plemons' cop succumbs to monstrous appetites upon convincing himself his wife (Stone) is actually an imposter. The question that arises is where all these funny-peculiar parlour games get us. Not for one moment watching Kinds of Kindness do you believe these are human beings behaving to some degree as human beings do in the real world. No, they're plainly just human beings behaving as human beings do in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie: eternally shifty and suspicious, sometimes murderous, incapable of joy, bound for defeat. (Story three, a total dead zone titled "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich", clogged up with weird people doing inexplicably weird shit and one especially egregious example of Arthouse Rape, starts and ends in a mortuary, which feels more like Lanthimos's natural home than the multiplex, devoid of life though the latter often is nowadays.)

In order to get the joke - in as much as there is a joke to get - you will, then, have had to have put yourself through the trouble of watching Lanthimos's previous films, and possibly even reading the press interviews in which the director chuckles his way around the core theme of those films: humans suck. Humans suck, Lanthimos giggles, and just when you think they can't suck any more, they generally come up with a way of sucking even harder. It's a theme hammered away at - within the filmography, and in each of these non-variations - in much the same way Kinds composer Jerskin Fendrix repeatedly bashes away at the extreme ends of his piano. Artless keyboard abuse aside, Kinds proves less aggravating than the performative provocation of Poor Things: wherever they can, the cast try to bulk out their director's reed-thin worldview, and Plemons, in the first story, gets closer than anybody in this filmography to embodying a character who looks and sounds like quivering flesh-and-blood. The Cannes Best Actor prize was deserved - but it can't quite make up for Lanthimos's ongoing insistence on leaving Stone wan, bashed-up and/or otherwise degraded, or the more general substitution of out-there poses and quirks for funny, revealing, enlightening gags. But it's easier to dash the former off; nihilism means never having to consider your position. Lanthimos already has his next project - a rehash of the Korean hit Save the Green Planet!, with Stone once more attached - lined up and dated. All I can say, at risk of giving you More of the Same (Criticism), is that the culture is granting a lot of leeway, money and column inches to someone who feels less like a major contemporary filmmaker than a glitch we just need to endure until the movies have finished working through their issues and start making sense again.

Kinds of Kindness opens in cinemas nationwide today.