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Kinds of Kindness Explained: The Three Stories, Cast, Themes, and Where to Watch

Kinds of Kindness is Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou’s dark 2024 triptych about control, identity, belonging, and freedom, with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in recurring roles.
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Kinds of Kindness is a 2024 Yorgos Lanthimos film told as a three-part fable, not a conventional single narrative. Written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, the 165-minute United States–United Kingdom production follows three situations: a man trying to reclaim control of his life from his employer, a policeman who doubts that his wife is the same person after she returns from a presumed disappearance at sea, and a woman searching for a prophesied person who may revive the dead and become a spiritual leader.

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, and Mamoudou Athie reappear in different roles across the segments. The result is a deliberately unsettling film about identity, obedience, belonging, freedom, and the ways kindness can become a form of coercion.

What kind of film is Kinds of Kindness?

Kinds of Kindness is not a conventional linear drama or a three-part sequel. It is a 165-minute anthology film, or triptych, in which three unsettling stories share a creative universe, recurring performers, and the initials R.M.F. Each segment examines people who surrender personal freedom in exchange for approval, security, love, work, or spiritual belonging.

The film is divided into The Death of R.M.F., R.M.F. Is Flying, and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. The same actors reappear as different characters, so the viewer recognizes faces while losing the comfort of ordinary continuity. That unusual structure is the key to understanding Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou’s film: the stories are separate, but the power relationships within them keep echoing one another.

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Kinds of Kindness at a glance

Detail Information
Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou
Release year 2024
Production United States and United Kingdom
Runtime 165 minutes
Premiere 77th Festival de Cannes, in Competition, May 2024
Principal cast Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer
Music Jerskin Fendrix

The three stories

Spoiler warning: The following section discusses the premises and central conflicts of all three segments. It avoids detailed ending spoilers, but it is best read after watching the film if you want to know as little as possible.

1. The Death of R.M.F.

The first story follows Robert, a man whose professional and personal life is organized by Raymond, his powerful employer. Raymond dictates a prescribed routine, and Robert initially accepts that arrangement as the price of stability and approval. When Robert tries to make a choice outside Raymond’s instructions, a seemingly small act of independence becomes a serious test of obedience.

The segment turns an ordinary workplace hierarchy into something closer to a private belief system. Robert is not simply dealing with a demanding boss; he has allowed Raymond’s expectations to define what a successful life looks like. The conflict is therefore less about one forbidden decision than about whether Robert can recognize his own desires after years of having them selected for him.

2. R.M.F. Is Flying

The second story centers on Daniel, a police officer whose wife, Liz, returns after being presumed lost at sea. Her return should resolve a trauma, but Daniel becomes convinced that she is not the same person. His uncertainty develops into suspicion, and suspicion becomes a demand for increasingly extreme proof of identity, loyalty, and love.

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This segment places marriage under the pressure of surveillance. Daniel wants certainty, but his attempts to obtain it make genuine intimacy impossible. The story asks whether devotion can still be called devotion when it must be demonstrated on command. It also makes identity frighteningly unstable: a familiar face and a shared history may not be enough to satisfy someone who needs absolute proof.

3. R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich

The final story follows Emily, who is involved with a religious commune and searching for a prophesied person with a special ability. That person may revive the dead and become a spiritual leader. Emily’s search gives the film its most overtly religious and cult-related dimension, while also extending the earlier stories’ interest in belonging and obedience.

The commune offers a community built around shared faith, but its belief system also establishes rules about purity, loyalty, and who is allowed to belong. Emily’s spiritual goal is therefore inseparable from the demands of the group. The segment asks how far a person will go to find meaning, and what happens when the desire to serve a higher purpose becomes another way of surrendering individual judgment.

Why the recurring cast matters

Repeated casting is not incidental trivia or a visual prank. Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, and Mamoudou Athie all play multiple roles across the triptych. Stone plays Rita, Liz, and Emily; Plemons plays Robert, Daniel, and Andrew; Dafoe plays Raymond, George, and Omi; and Athie plays Will, Neil, and a morgue nurse. Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Hunter Schafer are also part of the principal ensemble.

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Lanthimos has described the casting as a way to create familiarity and a subconscious sense of continuation without using an obvious visual device. The effect is disorienting but purposeful. A performer’s face carries an impression from one segment into the next, even when the character, relationship, and social position have changed completely.

That design encourages a useful interpretation: the film is less interested in isolated villains than in recurring roles within systems of power. The controlling employer, suspicious spouse, and spiritual authority belong to different worlds, yet each world pressures people to perform obedience. The same actors make those patterns feel connected without proving that the stories literally happen to the same people.

What does R.M.F. mean?

The film never provides a single, officially confirmed explanation that resolves every appearance of R.M.F. The initials function as a connective device across the three stories and appear in the segment titles, but treating them as one definitive code risks making the film seem more like a puzzle with a hidden answer than the deliberately open-ended fable it is.

R.M.F. can be approached as a recurring name, object, or marker that links otherwise separate situations. Viewers may assign symbolic meanings to it, but those readings should remain interpretations rather than statements of established fact. The important structural point is that the initials reinforce the film’s shared universe while leaving the exact nature of that connection unstable.

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The film’s central themes

Control disguised as care

The title is deliberately ambiguous. Kindness can be sincere, but it can also be demanded, performed, or weaponized. Raymond may frame control as guidance. Daniel may frame coercive tests as proof of love. The commune may frame submission as spiritual purpose. In each case, a person’s need for care or acceptance creates an opening through which another person or institution can exercise power.

This does not mean that every act of kindness in the film is secretly malicious. The more uncomfortable idea is that care and control can coexist. A person may believe they are helping while also restricting someone else’s choices, and a vulnerable person may accept domination because it arrives in the language of love, work, family, or faith.

Identity and the need for recognition

All three stories involve characters who need to be recognized in a particular way. Robert wants to be the obedient employee Raymond values. Daniel needs Liz to be the exact wife he remembers. Emily wants to fulfill a spiritual role that the commune will recognize as meaningful. Their identities are not entirely private; they are constructed through the demands and judgments of other people.

The repeated performers intensify this theme. The audience recognizes an actor even when the character has changed, while the characters within each story struggle to decide whether the person in front of them is authentic. The film turns recognition into something unstable rather than reassuring.

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Belonging versus freedom

Freedom is not presented as an uncomplicated good that the characters can simply choose. Raymond’s system gives Robert order. Daniel’s demands emerge from grief and fear. Emily’s commune offers a collective purpose. Leaving these structures would mean giving up security, certainty, or belonging as well as escaping control.

That tension helps explain why the film’s characters can make choices that seem extreme from the outside. They are not merely irrational; they are negotiating the frightening possibility that life without a controlling structure may feel emptier than life inside one.

Absurdity as a pressure test

Kinds of Kindness combines deadpan comedy, psychological horror, sexual extremity, bodily violence, and religious imagery. The humor often comes from the calm, procedural way characters respond to situations that should be emotionally or morally overwhelming. That contrast makes the film funny and disturbing at the same time.

Lanthimos uses absurdity to expose social behavior that might otherwise look normal. A workplace demand, a marital expectation, or a religious rule can appear reasonable until it is extended to an extreme. The film’s strange situations are not simply escapes from reality; they are pressure tests for familiar forms of obedience.

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Cast and performances

Jesse Plemons is the only performer to receive one of the 2024 Cannes acting prizes for the film, winning Best Actor for his work across the triptych. His performances show how the same physical reserve can suggest different kinds of vulnerability: Robert is shaped by professional obedience, Daniel by suspicion and grief, and Andrew by the social world of the final story.

Emma Stone’s three roles make her central to the film’s shifting emotional registers. Rita belongs to the first story’s world of authority and dependence, Liz is at the center of the second story’s identity crisis, and Emily carries the third segment’s religious search. Willem Dafoe similarly moves between different kinds of authority as Raymond, George, and Omi.

Mamoudou Athie’s appearances further reinforce the film’s formal design, while Qualley, Chau, Alwyn, and Schafer help create an ensemble in which no performer feels locked into one stable function. The casting makes the film feel like a set of variations on a social experiment rather than three ordinary short films placed side by side.

New Orleans, but not specifically New Orleans

The film was shot on location in New Orleans, yet the filmmakers intended the setting to read as an anonymous American city rather than as a story specifically about New Orleans. The location was selected for practical and visual reasons, including access to a lake and lake house, weather, incentives, and atmosphere.

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That distinction matters. The city provides the film’s physical textures, but the story does not depend on local history or geography in the way a location-specific drama would. The anonymous setting makes the social systems feel portable: the workplace, police environment, domestic interiors, and commune could belong to many places.

Production design makes the different power structures visible. Raymond’s house reflects wealth, taste, control, and carefully managed space. The commune’s lake house was conceived as a once-rich property repurposed into a ceremonial communal environment, with bunk beds and accumulated furniture. The contrast is not simply between luxury and poverty; it is between different styles of organization and authority.

Compared with the elaborate world-building of Poor Things, Lanthimos approached this film as a simpler, more contemporary production. The filmmakers relied more heavily on existing locations, natural lighting, and contemporary costumes rather than extensive studio construction. That restraint helps the surreal behavior feel uncomfortably close to ordinary life.

Key creative credits

  • Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou
  • Cinematography: Robbie Ryan
  • Production design: Anthony Gasparro
  • Costume design: Jennifer Johnson
  • Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
  • Music: Jerskin Fendrix

Cannes premiere and reception

Kinds of Kindness premiered in Competition at the 77th Festival de Cannes in May 2024. Plemons’s Best Actor award is the clearest major festival recognition attached to the film.

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The film is best approached as a divisive, challenging Lanthimos work rather than as a straightforward companion to Poor Things. It shares Stone and Dafoe with that film and again uses an unusual social world to examine human behavior, but it is structurally colder and more fragmented. Viewers looking for the romantic momentum, visual extravagance, or conventional emotional arc of Poor Things may find this film considerably more severe.

Its most accessible hooks are also its most unusual: three stories instead of one, familiar actors in unfamiliar roles, and a sustained examination of what people will surrender to gain approval or belonging. It is not necessary to find every scene pleasurable for the construction to be worth analyzing.

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Where to watch or own Kinds of Kindness

Availability depends on country, retailer, and date. The U.S. theatrical release was handled by Searchlight Pictures, digital availability followed in 2024, and the U.S. Blu-ray and DVD editions arrived on October 8, 2024.

Physical editions

For a permanent copy, the U.S. Kinds of Kindness Blu-ray is the strongest format choice. The Blu-ray + Digital HD edition is listed as a single BD-50 disc with 1080p video, English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, multiple subtitle and audio options, and a digital HD component. Check the retailer listing before purchase because stock and price can change.

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The Kinds of Kindness DVD was released on the same date and is a sensible alternative for viewers whose equipment does not support Blu-ray. The DVD is a single DVD-9 disc, but it does not provide the Blu-ray’s high-definition presentation. Neither format should be confused with a guaranteed streaming subscription: physical ownership and digital access are separate options.

Digital options

Prime Video lists options to rent Kinds of Kindness or buy it digitally, including a UHD listing. A separate version has also been listed with 23 minutes of additional material. Digital prices, bonus-content availability, video quality, and territorial rights are changeable, so confirm the details on the local listing before paying. A rent-or-buy page should not be read as proof that the film is included with a Prime subscription.

No verified title-specific physical soundtrack or licensed merchandise offer is necessary to watch the film. Collectors may find interest in Jerskin Fendrix’s soundtrack or official artwork, but availability and retailer legitimacy should be checked carefully before treating either as a recommended purchase.

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Content warning

This is a difficult film for some viewers. It includes disturbing violence, death, bodily injury, sexual material, coercive relationships, psychological manipulation, disturbing acts involving the body, and religious or cult-related themes. Its deadpan presentation can make the material feel even more uncomfortable because characters often respond to extreme events with unnerving calm.

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Who should watch it?

Kinds of Kindness is a strong choice for viewers who enjoy absurdist cinema, anthology structures, formally adventurous performances, black comedy, and films that leave interpretive space rather than explaining every symbol. It rewards attention to repeated gestures, authority figures, domestic rituals, and the changing meaning of familiar faces.

It is a poor fit if you want a conventional plot, sympathetic characters who behave consistently, a clear explanation of R.M.F., or a warm follow-up to Poor Things. The film’s purpose is not to make its systems of control comfortable or its symbols fully solvable. Its lasting question is more unsettling: when people say they are acting out of kindness, how can anyone tell whether they are offering care or asking for obedience?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kinds of Kindness one continuous story?

No. Kinds of Kindness is an anthology or triptych made up of three separate stories: The Death of R.M.F., R.M.F. Is Flying, and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. The stories are connected by recurring actors, thematic parallels, and the initials R.M.F., not by a conventional single-protagonist plot.

What does R.M.F. mean in Kinds of Kindness?

No single official explanation resolves every R.M.F. reference. The initials work as a connective device across the three segments, while their precise symbolic meaning remains open to interpretation.

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Is Kinds of Kindness a sequel to Poor Things?

The film is not a sequel to Poor Things. Both are directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and feature Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, but Kinds of Kindness is a separate contemporary triptych with a darker, more fragmented structure.

Where can you watch or buy Kinds of Kindness?

In the United States, the film has digital rent and purchase listings, including UHD on Prime Video, while the Blu-ray + Digital HD and DVD editions were released on October 8, 2024. Availability, pricing, and bonus content vary by location and can change.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line: Kinds of Kindness is a dark, 165-minute Lanthimos triptych about control, identity, belonging, and freedom. Its three stories are separate but thematically connected, and its recurring cast turns familiar faces into a deliberately unstable map of power. Watch it for the performances and ideas rather than a conventional narrative payoff, and check local digital or physical availability before choosing a format.

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.

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