Jesse Plemons Should Be Getting Oscar Consideration for This Trifecta of Performances

Following his sojourn into crowd-pleasing fare, audiences may have forgotten about the disturbingly cynical disposition of Yorgos Lanthimos. While The Favourite and Poor Things are not milquetoast dramedies by any means, compared to Lanthimos’ other bleak satires and character studies, such as Dogtooth and The Lobster, they might as well have been blockbuster romps. His 2024 film, the mysterious anthology film, Kinds of Kindness, based on its cryptic but snappy trailers scored by “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” promised another bitingly funny and humanely felt saga about eccentric characters from the outset. However, seemingly by design as a counter to the satisfactory urges of Poor Things, the film leaves audiences wanting more. Met with positive to mixed reviews, Kinds of Kindness is held together by a trio of triumphant performances byJesse Plemons, who would receive substantial Oscar consideration if he weren’t in such an uncanny film.

Yorgos Lanthimos Returned to His Dark Roots in ‘Kinds of Kindness’

With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos returned to his roots with this triptych absurdist film with pitch-black comedy that verges on pure human dread, incongruous with the film’s pop absurdism suggested in its trailer. With a deep ensemble cast that includes Lanthimos regular Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Hunter Schafer, the film is divided into three short stories with the cast playing different characters in each go-about, with the only shared throughline being the ominous moniker “R.M.F.” The first, “The Death of R.M.F.,” follows Robert Fletcher (Plemons), a woeful servant to his domineering boss, Raymond (Dafoe), who controls every aspect of his life. The second, “R.M.F. is Flying,” is about a police officer, Daniel (Plemons), whose presumed dead wife, Liz (Stone), returns home after being missing at sea, but he suspects that she might be a doppelgänger. The final, “R.M.F Eats a Sandwich,” chronicles a pair of cultists, Emily (Stone) and Andrew (Plemons), detoxifying humans to cultivate new life forms.

Jesse Plemons IS Vulnerable and Disturbing in His Three-Headed ‘Kinds of Kindness’ Performance

Each perverse moral fable in Kinds of Kindness is an enigma, and each conclusion offers no answers. The lone source of clarity and undisputed truth in this mystifying saga lies with Jesse Plemons, whose trio of performances is exceptional. Plemons, who stole the show with one terrifying scene in Civil War in 2024, earned the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his three unique turns as men disillusioned with themselves and their skewed reality. After a steady run playing recurring roles on television, Plemons has proven to be a versatile screen presence across all genres in indies and blockbusters. Like the best character actors before his time, he can shift from quirky oddballs to wholesome everyday folks. Being the surehanded role player that he is, Plemons never demands the spotlight, but you also never forget his impact in a film.

Kinds of Kindness is a culmination of Jesse Plemons’ remarkable work in auteur-driven films, as he has starred in seven Best Picture nominees. Aided by the triptych structure of Lanthimos’ film, the actor’s three performances outline his impeccable range as three different vulnerable and haunted men. “The Death of R.M.F.,” the first and best chapter of the film, brings a needed level of tact missing in the director’s cold and steely subsequent stories. Its success is a byproduct of its relatability, as we have all felt like thankless peasants working under an unflinching superior figure in some fashion. Plemons imbues this suffocating sensation with a precise blend of grounded humanity and Lanthimos’ pitch-black nihilism. At any moment, Robert will either submit to his surroundings or lash out in a violent frenzy, and Plemons leans into his precariousness with a disturbed uneasiness.

The genius of Plemons’ three-headed performance in Kinds of Kindness is its reticence. He never lets the viewer be privy to his precise emotion and psychological state, which embodies the mercurial ambiguity of Lanthimos’ vision. In “R.M.F. is Flying,” his turn as a grief-stricken police officer wrestling with reality and artificiality is incredibly still and mannered, suggesting that he’s in complete control of his perplexing surroundings. The entirety of Kinds of Kindness is one giant unsolvable mystery of human behavior and desires, which prevents the audience from ever feeling attached to any of these shorts, but the lone source of palpable human understanding comes from Plemons. It’s no surprise that the weakest short, “R.M.F Eats a Sandwich,” features the least amount of Plemons screen time. Even in a brief appearance, he expresses a longing for an unreachable sense of satisfaction in a hazy world.

For a film that presumably has zero Oscar aspirations on its mind, Jesse Plemons’ trio of superb performances in Kinds of Kindness deserves recognition or else we’ll continue to take one of our finest actors for granted.

Kinds of Kindness is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.

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