Yorgos Lanthimos fails his film in three fablesExBulletin

With his grimly funny films about people doing cruel things to each other in surreally absurd circumstances, Greek-born filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has long been what you might call an acquired taste. I acquired it quite early myself, when I first saw and loved his viciously twisted satire. dog toothin 2009.

In recent years, it's been gratifying to see so many others pick it up as well, including the director's brilliant period comedies The Favorite and Poor Things, both commercial successes that won Academy Awards. Lanthimos' success should not be taken lightly; He's one of the few European filmmakers I can think of who has managed to go Hollywood without diluting what makes him distinctive.

So I wish I had nicer things to say about his new film, which is called Kinds of Kindness. But for the first time in a long time, probably since his 2017 failures, The killing of a sacred deer Lanthimos seems to be spinning his wheels. Kinds of Kindnesswhich very deliberately runs two hours and 45 minutes, tells three dark fables set in the present day, all of which feature the same actors playing different characters.

In the first story, Jesse Plemons plays Robert, who lives under the thumb of his boss, Raymond, played by Willem Dafoe. (It's unclear what kind of business they work in.) Every morning, Raymond gives Robert detailed instructions on what to eat, what to wear, and even whether he should have sex with his wife, played by Hong Chau.

Everything Robert owns, including his house and car, was given to him by Raymond. When Robert finally refuses to follow any of Raymond's orders, let's just say it involves killing someone, he is immediately fired for his disloyalty. The rest of the story follows Robert as he struggles to get back into Raymond's good graces.

Plemons won Best Actor for his performance at the recent Cannes Film Festival, and deservedly so; he finds real notes of pathos there, and of all the actors in the film, it is his three characters who show the most range. In the second story, Plemons plays a gruff cop named Daniel, who mourns the presumed death of his marine biologist wife, Liz, who went missing during a research expedition. But then, miraculously, Liz, played by Emma Stone, is found alive and returns home, although Daniel almost immediately suspects that she is an imposter. The way he attempts to trap and expose her is definitely not for the faint of heart.

At this point, it is clear that Lanthimos is talking about the human drive to dominate others and the lack of free will. This is not an original thesis for him; again and again in his films he reminded us that we are all controlled by something, whether it is our work, our loved ones, our routines, our diet or our religions. The latter is made explicit in the third and most tedious story, which revolves around a bizarre cult, led by a couple played by Dafoe and Chau. Stone plays Emily, a high-ranking member of the cult who is excommunicated for violating its strict rules of bodily purity. Her efforts to return lead her into increasingly strange and unpleasant situations involving drugs, kidnapping and animal cruelty.

If the theme of Kinds of Kindness is control, strategy is repetition. Lanthimos not only recycles the same ideas and the same actors; it also repeats some of the same story beats, whether it's people getting into strange sexual situations, people ending up in horrible car crashes, you get the idea. Lanthimos is very clever in the way he sets up his patterns and motifs, but I was disappointed by the lack of rigor in his approach; his ideas seem exhausted here, and this exhaustion is contagious.

It's particularly disappointing to arrive so soon after Poor thingswhich, for all its transgressive sex and Frankensteinian weirdness, felt like a unified vision, a work with a real purpose that grew more interesting, not less, as it progressed. Kinds of Kindness, by contrast, feels like a lazy, self-admiring riff punctuated by occasional crude shocks, like when one character asks another to cut off their finger and serve it for dinner. Talk about an acquired taste.