Is Kinds of Kindness genius-level writing?
I want to pose a question to you.
It’s a simple question.
Here it is.
Have you seen Kinds of Kindness?
If not, why?
Maybe you can’t detect this but there’s a little aggression in the way that I’m posing the question because I see a lot of complaining in the movie space that movies don’t take risks anymore. They all play it safe. That’s why you don’t go to the movies as much.
Well, this movie does anything BUT play it safe. It’s about as risk-taking in the creativity department as a writer can get. So, why didn’t you see it?
You said you wanted stuff that’s different. This is different.
I have good news for you if you didn’t see it. I saw it for you. Mainly because it was free on Hulu.
The movie is definitely unique. It’s actually three separate 45 minute movies. With the same actors. Playing different roles in each one.
The first movie follows an executive named Robert who lives his life to please his boss, Raymond. Raymond controls every aspect of Robert’s life, from what he eats to when he has sex with his wife to what kinds of clothes he wears. But one day Raymond goes too far. He wants Robert to crash into another man’s car and kill him. Robert says no and Raymond deserts him. Robert then comes clean to his wife that the reason she can’t have children is because he’s been poisoning her coffee every morning (per Raymond’s instructions). So, of course, his wife leaves him. And now Raymond is desperate to get both her and Raymond back into his life.
The second movie follows Robert (who’s a completely different character now – a cop), who’s devastated that his wife, Rita, has gone missing. She was on a boat and the boat disappeared. But they find her on a deserted island. She comes back home and everything seems okay at first. But when she can’t fit her feet into her shoes, Robert suspects that she’s not his real wife. Robert then begins deteriorating mentally, going so far as to demand Rita cut off her finger and include it in his next dinner. Although a bargain basement police psychologist tries to help him get back on track, he keeps asking for more and more horrible things from Rita, until he goes too far.
The third movie follows Rita and Robert, who have fallen victim to a rich man’s cult. That cult is attempting to find a very special woman with supernatural abilities. So Rita and Robert are scouring the area trying to find this woman for their leader. But when Rita screws up and goes back to her former husband for a night, she’s deemed by the leader as “impure” and kicked out of the club. Rita now knows that her only way back in is if she finds the girl. So off she goes.
This is one of the more interesting explorations of screenwriting I’ve come across in a while because, usually, you can tell where a story is going. But when you take away most of the structure, you now have no idea where the story is going. And there’s something exciting about that. Cause for a good portion of the running times in all three movies, I struggled to guess what was going to happen next.
However, you can’t just write WHATEVER YOU WANT and expect it to work. When you’re going off-road, there are no more signs for your readers informing them they’ll be rewarded if they stay in the car. The way screenplays work is, like roads, they promise you things are coming up. This town is coming up in 30 miles. This other town is coming up in 70 miles. This big city is coming up in 120 miles.
Once you go off-road, there are no more towns or cities. You’re in the middle of freaking nowhere. So you have to find other ways to keep the reader turning the page. One of those ways is utilizing what I call the “Fallout Narrative.” The Fallout Narrative works like this. Something bad happens and then your hero struggles to adapt to it. That’s why we keep turning the pages. Because we want to see if he succeeds or fails in his adaptation.
So, in the first of the three movies here, the fallout is when Robert refuses to kill the other man in a crash. Raymond rejects him, leaving him without a job or a guide. Then his wife leaves him too. Robert is in major fallout mode. He has to try and get them back. In this particular scenario, the Fallout Narrative provides a couple of goals. Goal #1: Get Raymond to accept him again. Goal #2: Get his wife back.
When you have goals, you have active main characters. And an active main character will push the story along. If no one is trying to do anything, the story, by definition, cannot move.
The second of the three movies in Kinds of Kindness is also a Fallout Narrative. Rita comes back into her husband’s life. But her husband, Robert, is unconvinced that Rita *is* his real wife.
The storytelling mechanism behind why this works is a little more complex. Because the fallout to this one doesn’t create goals like the first one did. Instead, the fallout focuses on the deterioration of Robert. He becomes less and less convinced that Rita is his wife and the less convinced he becomes, the crazier he gets. There’s a wild scene where he and his cop partner stop a drunk driver and Robert shoots the passenger in the hand then runs over and starts trying to eat the blood from the wound.
If a character continues to change, whether it be in one direction (a good way) or the other (a bad way), we will keep turning the pages. It’s like approaching a car crash. We can’t wait to see just how bad the crash is. However, if Robert wasn’t getting worse, but rather staying the same, there would be no story here. Because there would be no fallout. It’s Robert’s deterioration that is the engine driving this middle story.
The third of the three movies is ALSO a fallout narrative, although it takes a little longer to get to the fallout. Rita and Robert are looking for this special girl. Rita goes back to her actual husband for a night. He rapes her. The leader now considers Rita impure. He kicks her out (this is the fallout) and now she’s desperately looking for this special woman so she can get back into the club.
What’s unique about the third story is that the first half is presented “in media res.” We’re dropped into this weird world where we don’t know who this cult guy is, what he’s talking about half the time, why Rita and Robert are testing a woman’s ability to raise the dead.
If you have enough odd things going on, that can definitely add an engine to your story until you move into a more traditional story engine. In the end, the name of the game is to keep the reader turning the pages. They will do that if you’re throwing weird stuff at them and they want to figure out what’s going on. Just don’t make them wait too long. If you keep piling weird onto weird onto weird, the reader eventually gets frustrated.
I would say that all three of these stories work, which goes to show that if you’re watching something artsy *AND IT WORKS* there’s a good chance that traditional storytelling mechanisms are in place. The writer is just better at camouflaging them.
When you watch weird/artsy stuff that sucks? It’s almost always because zero traditional storytelling mechanisms are being used. It’s just the writer trying to be weird for weird’s sake. That never works.
Even the story with the weakest plot engine here, the second one, technically has a goal driving the plot. Rita is trying to save her husband, who’s descending further and further into madness. But, to be clear, the reason why that’s the weakest story is because it has the weakest engine. Rita isn’t super-actively trying to save her husband, like Robert is trying to get his life back in the first story or Rita is trying to find the perfect girl in the third story.
That shows you that the IMPORTANCE of the goal to the hero (how much they want it) has a significant effect on how the reader takes in the story. The less your primary characters want something, the less your primary characters go after something, the slower the story will move and the more likely the reader will give up.
I do want to finish this article up by saying one thing. If you have three ideas, you have no ideas. There should always be a clear number one idea in your movie idea bag. If there isn’t, then you don’t have that idea worth writing yet. Kinds of Kindness is a “couldn’t make up my mind” movie: Throw three different shorts into the mix and call it a film. That’s a lazy move that rarely, if ever, pays off. You know how I know? Because nobody saw this movie.
You should’ve figured out which of these ideas was best and built a feature screenplay around that! They actually, all three of them, have the potential to be a feature film, with more development. To give us these tiny versions of all three stories feels like Yorgos gave up.
So, why did he do it? I would assume that Yorgos Lanthimos can get almost any actor he wants. With that said, the competition for the time of three of the most desired actors in Hollywood is immense. So, if you can offer them three roles for the price of one? That may be the deciding factor in picking you over [other hot director of the moment].
Which is another helpful reminder to write characters that actors can’t resist.
This movie WILL make my Top 10 of the year, no doubt. But it’s certainly not going to be for everyone. If you want to test your screenwriting mettle, however, I say check it out. It allows you to see how writing in non-traditional ways affects the viewing experience.
