Spoiler alert! We discuss major plot details of the new movie “Kinds of Kindness” (in theaters now).
Emma Stone is back with another curio that makes us shudder.
“Kinds of Kindness” is the actress’s fourth collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, just months after their bizarre Frankenstein film “Poor Things” earned Stone her second Best Actress Oscar. Nearly three hours long, the dark comedy is divided into three loosely related stories, all featuring a core cast of actors playing different roles.
The most intriguing story is the provocative middle part, “RMF Is Flying,” which puts a deranged spin on the true-crime genre. In the roughly 40-minute film, a stuffy cop named Daniel (Jesse Plemons) is thrilled when his missing wife, Liz (Stone), returns after a search party gone awry. But soon, Daniel begins to suspect that the woman living in his house is not the real Liz, but an imposter. He begins to test her devotion: first, by ordering her to cut off her fingers and cook them for dinner. When she complies, Daniel goes one step further by demanding that she cut out his liver.
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The mind-bending mystery grew out of conversations between Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou, who wanted to explore relationships and memory. “You can sometimes forget the people you love and not recognize them anymore,” Lanthimos says. “At one point, I had written this little thing about a woman offering parts of herself to someone to show her love. As we discussed the film, we felt like those ideas made sense.”
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In the other two sections of “Kinds of Kindness,” Plemons, 36, plays a cult member and a submissive businessman. But he says Daniel was the character he felt the least confident with.
“He was hard to pin down, which I really appreciated,” Plemons says. “He was really suffering at first, and the feeling of his partner missing could have brought up any number of things. »
The funniest and most awkward moment in “RMF Is Flying” comes early on, when Daniel invites his swinger friends Martha (Margaret Qualley) and Neil (Mamoudou Athie) over for dinner. Afterward, he awkwardly asks them to watch a homemade sex tape they made with Liz.
“He just wanted to relive the good old days. The simpler times!” Plemons jokes. The Oscar-nominated actor says he was initially nervous about shooting the graphic group scene. “You know, it’s going to be a little weird,” he recalls. But on that day, “it was just the actors, Yorgos and the intimacy coordinator in the room. It’s definitely a little uncomfortable, but the intimacy coordinator walks you through the conversations you need to have so everyone feels safe.”
The ending of “RMF Is Flying” is intended to be “ambiguous”
Aside from the numbness, the film’s gruesome imagery may be hard to stomach for some audiences. After agreeing to cut off his fingers (actually: silicone replicas), Liz reluctantly decides to carve out his liver and serve it for dinner. The prop used in the film is a real animal organ. (“Pig liver or cow liver, I can’t remember which,” Lanthimos says.)
“RMF Is Flying” ends with Daniel entering the kitchen, where he discovers Liz dead on the floor, having bled to death after trying to extract her liver. The doorbell rings, and Daniel greets another Liz (also played by Stone) with a warm embrace. The final moments are left intentionally vague: Did Daniel manipulate his real wife into committing suicide? Or was it an imposter who was in his home all along?
“I don’t think there’s any wrong interpretation or wrong answer,” says Plemons, who won the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival last month for his performance. “It can change from one viewing to the next – it even evolved for me during filming. But for me, as Daniel, I had to feel like he was right and she was a fraud. »
For most of the film, the audience is in Daniel’s shoes and watches Liz’s strange behavior: she struggles to fit into her heels and voraciously devours chocolate cake (a food she previously hated). But as the story progresses, Liz becomes concerned about Daniel’s mental health, and he becomes increasingly deluded. The audience is left baffled and unsure of who to trust.
“It’s really ambiguous in the sense of, ‘Who’s right? Is it all in their heads? Are they both right?’” Lanthimos says. “That’s why we thought it was an interesting story to tell and allow people to ask those questions.”
Gn entert
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