What is Kinds of Kindness about?
Yorgos said that with Kinds of Kindness he wanted to explore control and power dynamics. But decided to break that up over three separate stories. So while each segment in Kinds of Kindness stands on its own, each parallels the other in exploring ideas of control, sacrifice, and the line between kindness and cruelty.
Cast
- Rita/Liz/Emily – Emma Stone
- Robert/Daniel/Andrew – Jesse Plemons
- Raymond/George/Omi – Willem Dafoe
- Sarah/Sharon/Aka – Hong Chau
- Vivian/Martha/Ruth/Rebecca – Margaret Qualley
- Will/Neil/Nurse – Mamoudou Athie
- R.M.F. – Yogos Stefanakos
- Collector/Drunk/Joseph – Joe Alwyn
- Anna – Hunter Schafer
- Written by – Yorgos Lanthimos | Efthimis Filippou
- Directed by – Yorgos Lanthimos
Figuring out the meaning of Kinds of Kindness
I thought it would be fun to show how I work through analyzing a movie. And Kinds of Kindness is weird enough that there’s a lot to piece together.
[Note. Coming back to this after having written everything. Very pleased with how it went! I think it’s a good demonstration of the process. In case you’re curious: I wrote this entire piece linearly and made zero edits; what you’ll read is essentially the first draft (aside from fixing typos). I wrote the “about” section at the top of the article after finishing everything below. And this is the last thing I’m adding before posting.]
Step 1: Summarize
“Sweet Dreams” plays before anything else
The Death of R.M.F.: Robert is under the control of his boss, Raymond. Part of being loyal to his boss is causing a car crash that will hurt Robert and kill R.M.F. Robert’s marriage falls apart. Having to make his own decisions drives him crazy. Uses relationship with Rita to win back his boss’s favor. Runs over R.M.F., like Raymond wanted. We see Robert, Raymond, and Raymond’s wife, Vivian, cuddling together.
R.M.F. is Flying: Liz is lost at sea. Daniel struggles with her being gone. His friends comfort him. When Liz returns, he doesn’t believe it’s her. She hated chocolate, but now eats chocolate. Liz has her dog tag, but Daniel also has her dog tag. Her shoes don’t fit. She doesn’t remember his favorite song. Daniel refuses to eat, despite Liz’s begging. Daniel clearly has a mental break that results in him licking the wounded hand of a guy he shot. Doctor diagnosis him with persecutory delusion (which is real). Medicine doesn’t seem to help. Asking Liz to cut off and cook a finger is a loyalty test. Does she do it because she loves him or because she’s a replacement who doesn’t know to object? Then requests her liver. She dies trying to please him. “Real” Liz “returns”. Oh, Liz’s dream about the dogs running the island and how they would lick wounds resonates with Daniel licking a wound. Also, Daniel, Liz, Neil, and Martha would all sleep together. R.M.F. was the helicopter pilot who saved Liz.
R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich: Emily and Andrew are agents for a cult in search of a woman they believe can bring the dead back to life. Emily’s estranged from her husband and daughter. Cult leader husband and wife sleep with all their members. Emily’s husband, Joseph, drugs her to sleep with her. She’s now “contaminated” in the eyes of the cult. Fails purification via sauna and is kicked out. But her dream about the messiah woman’s identity proves true. Emily finds Ruth. Ruth brings R.M.F. back from the dead. Emily hopes the cult will re-accept her, except on the way there she crashes her car and kills the miracle woman. R.M.F. eats a sandwich.
Step 2: Look for commonalities
Robert has Raymond tell him how to live. Liz begs Daniel to let her feed him. And Emily wants to commit her life to the cult’s mission. When we look at those dynamics, we get control, power, fear, and feeling needed. Raymond is a boss. Daniel is a police officer. And Omi and Aka are cult leaders. Are positions of power rooted in control and fear.
Sarah leaves Robert. Daniel pulls away from Liz. And Emily abandons her family. So strained and failed marriages. Betrayal in a relationship.
Robert is physically intimate with Raymond and Vivian (to some degree). Liz and Daniel sleep with Neil and Martha. Everyone in the cult sleeps with its leaders, Omi and Aka. So polygamy is a motif.
Robert’s supposed to cause a fatal car crash. Liz is in a boat wreck. And Emily does cause a fatal crash.
Robert gives up having kids because Raymond tells him to. Liz cuts out her liver because Daniel wants it. And Rebecca dives into an empty pool to fulfill the cult’s prophecy. You can label those under sacrifice.
R.M.F. dies via car. He saves Liz. Ruth resurrects him but she dies via a car.
Robert struggles to eat. Daniel stops eating. Liz talks about struggling to eat and eventually giving in to chocolate and how it’s better to have something reliable then maybe not get anything better. Emily and Andrew only drink cult water. R.M.F. eats a sandwich.
Step 3: Compare the beginning to the end
Beginning: R.M.F. pulls up to Raymond’s house. Vivian lets him in. She describes, over the phone, R.M.F. to Raymond. Robert crashes into R.M.F.
Ending: Emily crashes and Ruth dies. R.M.F. eats a sandwich.
Step 4: Look at the title
Kinds of Kindness. So we have the idea of kindness but it’s various types of kindness. You can test this by replacing “Kindness” with another concept. A story called Kinds of Love might show love in various forms—friendship, family, between a person and their pet, love between colleagues who depend on one another, romantic love, etc. A story called Kinds of Violence might show different types of violence. Physical, verbal, emotional, PTSD, etc. While some types can be on the nose, you can get weirder with it.
Imagine an art exhibit called Kinds of Music and it’s music made by scraping silverware together, or music made from the sounds of Los Angeles traffic, or music made from listening to a room full of people typing. You don’t get music in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s atonal and from unexpected real-world sources. That’s Kinds of Kindness. What we see isn’t kindness in the traditional vein of gifts, hugs, surprises, or words of affirmation. Rather, it’s atonal kindness. Kindness that might actually be cruelty.
Like let’s use Robert and Raymond as an example. How Raymond treats Robert is pretty gross. Asking him to injure himself, to commit murder, to never have kids. It’s unhealthy. Demented, even. But Robert also feels overwhelmed and incapable. He wants structure. Believes he needs structure. And his life was, for the most part, relatively good. He had a seemingly happy marriage, a seemingly decent job, and a terrific house. Was Raymond not, in many ways, kind?
The complexities of that dynamic repeat in the other chapters. Daniel gets his wife back! Except he then doesn’t believe it’s her. That feels in the vein of the monkey paw. Your wish comes true but at what cost? And then Liz is so kind that she’ll literally cut out her liver because he asks her to. Isn’t such a thing as being too kind? For Emily and Andrew, what happens when Andrew’s sick? Emily kindly takes care of him. Except she’s trying to get him to fall asleep so she can go see her estranged husband and daughter. It’s kindness with an ulterior motive. The cult loves all of its members, until they break a rule. So it’s conditional kindness.
So we have all of these version of kindness that have a dissonance to them. That makes me think the film is reflecting on what is and isn’t kindness. Is there a line? If so, where is it? If we’re thinking in terms of binaries, ones and zeros, when does an act go from kind to not kind? Can it be that cut and dry? Or are there complicated gray areas?
Even something as simple as Emily sneaking back into her old house to leave her daughter a present. Or clandestinely going to see her daughter. That’s kind, right? Except she has no intention of coming home. She’s completely committed to the cult. So how kind is it? She left in the first place. Some might argue it’s harder on the daughter to only see her mom in glimpses like this, that it’s actually unfair. Like her mom leaving is a wound that tries to heal but everytime Emily makes a brief appearance it rips the scab off.
Step 5: Initial hypothesis
Kinds of Kindness uses three different stories to explore the line between kindness and cruelty. It focuses especially on kindness and cruelty in terms of control, marriage, sacrifice, and intimacy.
Step 6: Research
Just to be clear, everything preceding this I wrote before doing any research. Trying to keep it realistic. So if something is very wrong, that happens, it’s part of the process! But if it’s very right, then that’s great.
Here’s an article that argues for a Christian reading. I disagree with the conclusions but the resurrection of R.M.F. does have biblical connotations. So is there something there? The context of the resurrection, in the film, is decidedly not Christian but part of the beliefs of the cult. So it seems the film purposefully wanted to steer clear of the biblical reading?
Variety spoke to Yorgos. The Greek filmmaker noted that RMF doesn’t represent anything in particular: “You can apply any kind of explanation that you want or your own thoughts.”
Stone and Yorgos interview with the Associated Press. Yorgos said reading Caligula, the play by Albert Camus, inspired him. He says, “So I did start thinking about one man’s control over other people’s lives. Then I thought it would be interesting to explore something on a more personal level, how would that feel?, like having someone be in total control of your life. Even in the most minute detail. So then we started writing this but then quickly we felt that we also wanted to experiment with form a little bit and that’s when the idea of making a triptych came about.”
Yorgos Q&A in NYC. “We [wrote the stories] in parallel and we always kind of were paying attention to their relation, like seeing two scenes from the first story then two scenes from the next story. The fact that they were written like that then were separated kind of painted them with some kind of consistency that’s not necessarily literal but I think it kind of remains.”
Joe Alwyn in an interview with Polygon. What does it all mean, though? Lanthimos won’t be drawn on that—but Alwyn is extremely clear…offers a perceptive summary of the unifying theme of Kinds of Kindness. “Throughout, you have people reaching out with perceived kindness and benevolence, whether it’s a boss offering structure and reward to an employee looking for purpose, or cult leaders offering a home to a woman whose life has recently changed—offering, you know, what she thinks is love. But actually, whilst that’s kindness on paper, if you write it down, it’s far more about control or coercive control, manipulation, power imbalance.” As gnomic a director as Lanthimos is, his actors clearly know exactly what he’s up to.
I promise you, I posted what I found in order. I did not save that Alwyn quote for last. Or read it ahead of time. I actually was going to stop after the Q&A in New York but had this tab still open from when I clicked on a bunch of Google results. Amazing.
Step 7: Putting everything into context
Now that we feel comfortable with our hypothesis, we can revisit various moments and view them through our conclusion of what the film’s about. For example, the use of “Sweet Dreams” at the beginning.
We know dreams are a motif in Kinds of Kindness. So there’s something to the idea that each of the three vignettes is a dream. Meaning the song mostly grounds us in an energy and tells us to not take what’s happening literally but to view it as something fantastic that relates to life (like a dream).
But what about the lyrics themselves?
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
Yup. There we go. We know the film is about control. We know it’s about the line between kindness and cruelty, or false kindness. And now we have these song lyrics that mention using and being used. Which gets at power dynamics, relationships, and the complicated relationship between pleasure and pain.
That lines up with everything we’ve talked about, right?
At this point, I’d go back through the earlier commonalities and check them. There are aspects like “being a police officer” that’s inherently tied to ideas of control and kindness/cruelty. Then you have “polygamy” which is much less charged and open to interpretation. In this case, I’d apply the kindness/cruelty filter and argue that it speaks more pointedly about power inequality in open relationships. Like with the cult, Omi and Aka sleep with all their followers, but it creates longing and jealousy in someone like Andrew who becomes attached to Omi. And then the wife-swapping in the second story. Daniel looks back on it fondly, while Neil and Martha find it awkward. So awkward, in fact, they pass when Liz asks them all to do it again, despite the whole “she almost died” card.
And then with the ending, you have Ruth who has the most incredible power the world has ever seen, she’s Emily’s cult’s prophesied messiah. And how does Ruth treat this woman who can bring people back from the dead? Drugs her. Disrespectfully weighs and expects her. Dances next to her unconscious body. Then drives like a maniac despite the precious cargo. Emily’s thinking, “I’m going to change the world.” Or, at least, “I’m going to get back into my cult. Then we’ll change the world.” She’s on a mission with good intentions. But her kindness is…lacking. And the result is death.
And R.M.F. Well, Yorgos already said you can apply anything you want to R.M.F. It seemed they wanted to use him more as a throughline than as a meaningful piece of the puzzle. You could say that he experiences death and comes back to life and there’s something simple and beautiful about eating a sandwich.
I’d argue that the ketchup spill on his shirt lines up with the double-edged nature of everything we’ve talked about. So much of the movie is the negative aspect of this positive thing (like the cost of someone being kind to you). And here, we see that even eating a sandwich has its pitfalls. It’s almost like a statement about life. You could view that as really cynical. But R.M.F. should be dead. I’m sure he doesn’t mind a little ketchup. Which, I think, gets back to “Sweet Dreams”. What is life but a kind of kindness? A sweet dream. How’s the song end? “Hold your head up. Keep your head up.”
Step 8: We can now explain Kinds of Kindness
I hope this helped! If you have any questions about the process, please, leave them below!
Is R.M.F. the same guy in all the stories?
Honestly, details about R.M.F. don’t really change the themes or point of Kinds of Kindness. If it is the same guy, so what? We know the actors are all supposed to be different people. It’s not like R.M.F. being the same throughout suddenly means that Robert, Daniel, and Andrew were all one person. Or that Rita, Liz, and Emily were the same person. If that were the case, it would make things even more confusing.
If anything, it would simply be curiosity. A fun detail. For example, when Robert runs over R.M.F., we see blood bloom on F’s chest, under his shirt. So it’s a major injury to the torso. Later, in the third segment, in the morgue, we see bruising on his torso. Does this mean we’re in the same world?! Again, it doesn’t really change anything. All the characters would still be unique people who happen to look like one another.
But there’s no deeper narrative layer to discover. It’s not Donnie Darko where there’s a complicated system we have to figure out to fully understand the movie. Yorgos said they just wanted a throughline that would help viewers see the stories as interconnected. So R.M.F. is more of a functional entity for passive viewers than some secret quest for active viewers to embark on.
What does RMF stand for?
Yorgos said in an interview that the letters have no meaning.
What happened to Sarah?
Sara really wants nothing to do with Robert. Remember how he checked a few closets and they were empty? That was supposed to imply Sarah packed and left. So nothing nefarious. Just didn’t want to stay with someone who had poisoned and lied to her.
Were there two Liz’s? What’s the meaning of the second segment’s ending?
So the first segment is pretty grounded. Only the people are bizarre. The second segment feels almost like a fable or a Greek myth. For example. A husband doesn’t believe his wife loves him so asks her to cook one of her own fingers and serve it to him. She does! That surely must prove her love! But he’s unconvinced. So he asks her to cut out her liver and cook it for him to eat. She does! But dies before she can cook it. Surely, SURELY, that must prove her love? The irony being that she’s now gone. In being afraid of losing her, he actually lost her.
Obviously what happened in the movie is different. Daniel wasn’t trying to make her prove her love. He was simply being cruel and exploiting her desire to please him. My point is more so that the structure has a dark fairy tale quality to it. And that would be why the second Liz appearing at the end isn’t weird. Because the story is already leaning toward the fantastic and metaphorical.
So you can view the second Liz as the externalization of Daniel’s love for his wife returning to him. But because of his mental illness he’s experiencing the feeling outside of his own body. Remember, this is the guy who tried licking the bleeding hand of a guy he shot. He’s not all there. Ending the segment with his subjective perspective intruding into the mise-en-scene is a viable choice.
To put this into perspective, think about the first story. Robert doesn’t do what Raymond asked of him. Raymond cuts him off. At the end, Robert wins back Raymond’s affection. Here, Liz isn’t exactly how Daniel remembers her. He cuts her off. At the end, she wins back his affection. We call this parallelism. You see it in the third segment. Emily’s in with the cult. She gets cut off from the cult. Finding Ruth is her way back into the cult. We see the same parallels between all three segments. Same finish line each time, but crossed in different ways. Segment one has a “happy” ending. Segment two has a tragic ending. And segment three has a comedic ending.
In terms of the details around Liz’s feet growing and the dog tag. We don’t really have great answers because the story isn’t supposed to be literal. Thinking about it too much will always be futile. With that said…The cat initially hisses at Liz but later it cuddles with her. Things like eating chocolate and her feet being larger probably have something to do with surviving on a desert island for however long. Her doing some weird things could just be PTSD. And the dog tag…I mean, you can have more than one dog tag. Especially if she left one at home? Maybe she always had an extra one on the boat?
Regardless, this is one of the few times I’ll ever say “don’t think about it too much” but I truly believe you shouldn’t think about it too much. The specifics aren’t what the story is about. It’s about Daniel’s reaction. Not whether his reaction is valid.
What was the meaning of Liz’s dog dream?
The dream has parallels within the segment. Specifically, Liz talks about how she didn’t eat for a few days because she wanted lamb and didn’t want chocolate but the lamb always ran out. So she finally gave in and ate chocolate, even though she hates chocolate. The conclusion she tells her father: It’s better to eat something that’s always available when you’re hungry than to depend on something that runs out early every morning. She then compares that to Daniel not being perfect.
Daniel also refuses to eat (and licks someone’s wounds like Liz says the dream dogs did). Instead of accepting what’s readily available, the chocolate rather than the lamb, so to speak, he demands the impossible—Liz’s body parts. And in asking so much of her, he loses her. She runs out.
So Liz was willing to accept Daniel as he is. But he wouldn’t do the same. Really, when you peel back all the outrageous, surreal aspects, we’re dealing with domestic abuse. Movies like Waitress or A Star is Born tell similar stories in much more realistic ways. But Yorgos doesn’t like realism. Thus, we get something weirder and defamiliarized.
Why does Rebecca jump into the pool?
Because the cult’s prophecy says the resurrector has a dead twin. I guess the implication is that even though Rebecca wasn’t in the cult she had researched it and believed in it? Probably because of what she had experienced already with Ruth bringing her back from the dead.
What was the deal with the water?
Emily and Andrew would only drink specially bottled water. It’s a cult thing. It comes up a few times but they believe water is sacred because the body is mostly water. So you shouldn’t drink “toxic” water from outside the cult. Only water blessed by the tears of Omi and Aka. Which is why we see the two leaders lean over the water tank and shed tears into it. It gets back to that double-edged sword we’ve talked about. “Here, we’re providing you with this purified water. But you can only get it from us. And you’ll now always have a phobia about what you drink.” It’s ultimately another means of control.
Is Kinds of Kindness a sequel to Poor Things? Is it related to The Lobster?
No and no. Yorgos and Stone did start discussing Kinds of Kindness while finishing up Poor Things. But the two films have nothing to do with one another. And while the dog dream might have people thinking about The Lobster, there’s no connection there either.
When news and interviews about the film, and especially the trailer, came out, before watching it I thought a lot about the concept of the triptych in painting, which exists in almost every museum around the world. By definition, a triptych is usually a set of three paintings joined by a triple frame (giving the appearance of being one work), or just three paintings together forming a single image. It is a creation of Christian art (especially Catholic), but it is not only used in devotional paintings, as many artists use it mainly in small collections or historical subjects. So I watched the film with this image of the triptych and it made a lot of sense. Thank you very much for the article!
I mean the chocolate eating and swollen feet could just be due to her being pregnant
My theory is that Raymond and Omi are the same person. Both wealthy, both unquestioned leaders obsessed with what people around them eat or drink. Both polygamous. Raymond’s “trips to Germany” could just be him spending more time with the cult he leads as Omi.
I would say Sarah and Aka are also the same person. Sarah is clearly another pawn in Raymond’s schemes for Roberts life, she only seems to be willing to get pregnant for the cult and nothing else. R.M.F. dying and resurrecting in the first and third story respectively is just the connecting tissue.
The only hole I see in this logic is that the second story seem to be completely disconnected from the rest. Great movie overall and interesting analysis.
I had a theory that maybe in the second story the dream had some truth to it and Liz was replaced by a dog.
That’s why she was excited to have chocolate now that she had a human body and that’s why the cat initially hissed at her. That’s also why she would stay loyal to the husband even after getting beaten by him. She just wanted to please him so she did anything he told her to. There’s also the DOG tags and her BEGGING him about food. The credits sequence also has dogs doing human stuff humorously.
Okay, maybe she isn’t literally a dog.
The movie is probably just comparing such blind kindness to how dogs are.
My take on it is that Defoe is the head of a cult and Emma, his daughter, seems to do acts of kindness for Jesse Plemons’ multiple characters. But everyone is still part of the cult until Emma releases the original RMF from death (via a car), who was killed in the first act after picking up a package from Dafoe’s girlfriend. Emma sacrifices the one true healer at the end via another car crash, which breaks herself out of the cult, potentially healing herself.
I enjoyed the movie but a lot of stuff goes right over my head, thank you for writing this
I absolutely adore how you put down your notes in this post to show your thought process. This movie has been on my mind for a few days too, so I enjoyed reading along. The more you think about it, the more you find it meaningful.