Kinds of Kindness is a dark comedy fable about choice and the need for control, from the director of The Lobster. Regular Lanthimos player Emma Stone stars alongside Jesse Plemons (who won Best Actor at Cannes 2024 for his turn), Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau in a surreal anthology triptych, playing different characters in each. One story concerns a man whose life is given over entirely to the whims and commands of his employer/lover, who may also be controlling others for inscrutable reasons; the second chapter follows a man whose wife seemingly returns from the dead but who behaves as an entirely different person; and the third tale revolves around two cult members searching for a woman who may have an uncanny god-like power.

Witty, caustic and mean: Kinds of Kindness is a return to the Yorgos that brought us Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Following up the Oscar-favourite Poor Things with a series of cruelly funny and bizarre parables is an incredible swerve, but a welcome one to be sure. Despite the deliberate amorality it remains mostly tethered to human experience by world-class performances (it cannot be overstated just how good Plemons is here) and a weird propulsive energy, with the final chapter an exhilarating odyssey to the edge of reason as cathartic and unburdened as anything in Lanthimos' work to date.