If Poor Things was a little coy about its quasi-feminist, pseudo-paedophilic subject matter, Yorgos Lanthimos is now fully back in sicko mode. If Poor Things was a little coy about its quasi-feminist, pseudo-paedophilic subject matter, the Greek auteur is now fully back in sicko mode. What they share beyond mood is a conviction that all interpersonal relationships result from a carefully-maintained balance of dominance and compliance, and that all romantic-and-or-sexual relationships especially are to some degree uneven, false, self-sabotaging or transactional.
Lanthimos suggests, in effect, that all of humanity is split into those who fuck and those who get fucked: sadists and masochists; tops and bottoms; masters and servants; bosses and employees; cult leaders and followers; husbands and wives or, if you prefer, wives and husbands. Who am I to disagree? It feels pointless, or perhaps beside the point, to hash out further details of the three plots, especially because I think Kinds of Kindness probably works best sight unseen.
It is possible to identify numerous recurring motifs or images: all of the stories end with a willing human sacrifice; all of them contain prominent references to feet, and to injured feet especially; doubling recurs, as does the idea of partner swapping; dogs, those classic symbols of submissive loyalty, play a crucial part in two of the three fables. In the universe of Kinds of Kindness , false love and false gods have left room for a kind of general psychic devolution, a state of confused unreality in which nobody is quite who they claim to be.
The film posits that we tend as a species to need guidance, and that the removal of that guidance can be fraught β not freeing but unmooring. Being forcefully reassured of who we really are, even if it is bad for us, hurts so good that it is hard to give it up. It is also the best and most fully realised story in the film. Great athletes are often compared to gods, and their wildest feats often described in quasi-theistic language β talk of miracles and fate. The artefacts that Raymond favours are at once a warning about what might happen when one eschews the natural order of things, and a reminder of the violence and the terror of transcendence.
See also: J. Perhaps it is the realisation that we are every bit as trapped and baffled as his characters, and that nothing any of us does makes a difference. Like God, a director has a vision and a plan, and it is our job to try to make sense of it. If we cannot, we are forced to accept that he moves in mysterious ways. By my estimation, there was something perverse about taking such a savage allegory about a sexy woman with the brain of a baby, and then rendering it as a candy-coloured tale of feminist empowerment and not perverse in a good way, i.
