The message here—that most of us, while fighting for our own free will, are fairly content, even reassured, to be told what to do (as we were during the many pandemic-triggered lockdowns), and wouldn’t know what to do with real freedom if we got it—was fairly clear to me, though the moral of the next section, “RMF is flying,” is murkier. In this portion, which may remind viewers of Garth Davis’s Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal vehicle Foe and the Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett-led Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea,” Plemons reappears as a policeman, the tormented husband of a woman (Emma Stone) who is lost at sea. When she returns, he’s convinced that something is terribly wrong—she seems out of sorts; her shoes don’t fit her; she once hated chocolate, but now craves it. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she’s an imposter, and dares her to prove her love to him in increasingly brutal ways.
Similar ideas of power and control—of exerting it, of escaping from it—also permeate the third story, hilariously called “RMF eats a sandwich.” (You’ll have to watch to the end to find out why.) In it, Plemons and Stone appear as two eccentric cult members who serve a pair of messianic leaders (Dafoe and Chau) and are on the hunt for a savior who has the power to bring people back to life. Hunter Schafer appears as a potential candidate for the role in an all-too-brief cameo, after which the community’s hopes hinge on Margaret Qualley, in the part of two beguiling twin sisters. All the while, Stone’s character seems riddled with guilt at having abandoned her daughter (Merah Benoit) and husband (Joe Alwyn) for her new life—though, when she does briefly return to them, we get a sense of why she might have left in the first place.
What these three tales actually mean when they’re brought together is up to you—and that, ultimately, is what makes this film so exciting. At a time when cinema is often maddeningly simplistic or prescriptive, Kinds of Kindness delights in its own ambiguity. It also provides no shortage of things to get your teeth into: supremely committed and off-kilter performances from the entire ensemble; the fleeting presence of the mysterious RMF, a crucial but peripheral character who bookends the film as a whole; plenty of Easter eggs for the viewers watching most closely (at the early screening I went to, whispers went around about certain props which reappear across the three stories, and what they could mean); and countless moments which made me genuinely shout out in horror. Across its almost-three-hour-long run time, an inordinate amount of blood is spilled, limbs broken, appendages axed, shots fired, and wounds licked with relish.